


Where No Man Has Gone Before

by clockheartedcrocodile



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alien Biology, Alien Cultural Differences, Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Andorian Thomas Blanky, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon-Typical Cannibalism, Canonical Character Death, Enemies to Lovers, Fight Sex, Half-Romulan Francis Crozier, Heavy Angst, Horror Elements, Masturbation, Mating Rituals, Monster of the Week, Multi, Pheromones, Pining, Pon Farr, Rough Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Supernatural Elements, Vulcan Thomas Jopson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:14:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23164564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockheartedcrocodile/pseuds/clockheartedcrocodile
Summary: In 2245, two Constitution-class Federation starships left Earth in an attempt to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no man has gone before. They were the most technologically advanced ships of their day.They were last seen by Tellerite merchants on the edge of Federation space, awaiting good conditions to enter warp six.Both ships then vanished.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Sophia Cracroft/Captain Francis Crozier
Comments: 52
Kudos: 187





	1. The Discovery Service

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written with an enthusiastic, but not encyclopedic, knowledge of Star Trek lore, so I hope you’ll forgive me any inaccuracies or any creative licenses I may have taken.

_Mnahe afw'ein qiuu, mrht heis'he ehl'ein qiuu._

_\- Romulan proverb_

_Hate has a reason for everything, but love is unreasonable._

☆

“Captain’s log, stardate 2247.05. Terror continues to drift.”

Saurian brandy burned when it went down but James Fitzjames knocked it back easily enough, only grimacing once. He poured himself another glass- only his second, he was no goddamn lushington- and reclined in his chair, lazily adjusting the neckline of his wraparound command tunic.

“The fact remains- both ships are utterly paralyzed in uncharted space,” he continued, speaking in a strong, slow voice for the recording. “The ion storm did more damage than we’d previously anticipated, though the exact nature and extent of the damage remains to be seen. Admiral Franklin ordered that Mr. Collins be beamed out to assess the condition of the starboard nacelle.”

Fitzjames remembered the difficulty they’d had beaming him back. By the time Collins had rematerialized he was white-faced and trembling, sweating even in the cool, clean transporter room, but the nacelle had been assessed and there was a chance that Erebus may yet achieve warp. Franklin hadn’t worried himself about it. _I envy you, Mr. Collins,_ he had said. _I have long wanted to walk among the stars._

“All ship’s operations are functioning as normal, if you discount warp capacity, manual spaceflight, communications with Starfleet, reliable food replication, and stable transport beams,” Fitzjames swallowed grimly. “We have one functioning shuttle between us. Terror’s status remains unchanged.

“Should the ships continue to drift apart, beaming between them with our transporters in their current state will become increasingly unrealistic. At the last officer’s meeting, Terror’s CMO McDonald suggested that we beam all willing volunteers from Terror over to Erebus before our ships become permanently separated. Ensign Hornby has already been discorporated mid-transport.

“The class M planet below us is the only astral body of any sort for lightyears in any direction, discounting various moons. The scanners indicate it is devoid of all life but two humanoid signals in the northern hemisphere. How they’ve survived down there in that planetwide arctic wasteland is anyone’s guess. Admiral Franklin intends to beam an away team down to investigate, helmed by Lieutenant Gore.”

Fitzjames ran a tired hand through his hair and yawned, his jaw clicking. He had not known exhaustion could be like this; a comprehensive fatigue of both mind and body, unglamorous and unproductive. The temptation to retire to his berth and sleep the gamma shift through was enormous, but he resisted it. He was not that kind of man, nor that kind of captain.

He would not allow Crozier’s misery to infect him.

“Admiral Franklin maintains a demeanor of good cheer despite everything. I admire him greatly for that,” Fitzjames continued. “He believes- as I must- that fortune will fall in our favor. That we have not been undone a mere two years into our five year mission.”

He could still hear Franklin’s words to Crozier behind the door. _Gray-hearted and hard to love_. While Fitzjames might privately agree with the sentiment, the turn of phrase displeased him. He wished Franklin had not said it. The knowledge that the Admiral might turn a man’s parentage against him in a moment of ill temper gnawed uneasily at the back of his mind.

 _“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center . . .”_ Fitzjames murmured thoughtfully, forgetting the log as his mind turned to his joyless counterpart aboard Terror. _“Observe degree, priority, and place . . . insisture, course, proportion, season, form . . . office, and custom, in all line of order . . .”_ Remembering himself, he cleared his throat. “Fitzjames out.”

His entry concluded, Fitzjames rose from his seat, feeling the ache of weariness cramping in his legs as he did so. The windows of the captain’s quarters afforded him a generous view of the black, so he gazed out at it for a while, admiring the beauty of the starfields. He had a clear view of Terror, so close and yet so far in the cold emptiness of space. She listed heavily to the side, almost on her back.

Fitzjames thought of Francis Crozier, sitting alone in the dark, looking out at the stars upside-down.

The thought almost made him smile.

☆

Francis Rujat Mirreere Crozier was the unhappy product of a marriage between a human and a Romulan. As such, his life was not lacking in humiliating personal embarrassments. This headache was the latest. He rubbed his eyes, the bridge of his nose, the solid slope of his brow ridge, but still it throbbed. He had long since reached the absolute limits of his patience.

This headache was the unwelcome herald of one of the many gifts his Romulan blood had afflicted him with. He was melancholic and choleric in equal measure. He drank. His face flushed green in a rage, yet his eyes were an appallingly human blue. His ears were human. His soul, he believed, was human. He had hoped- no, he had been sure, so very certain- that he would be spared this particular indignity.

Still, Crozier thought, his jaw set as he watched the Erebus through the cabin window. He had no illusions about what he was. Not human- not with his father’s blood in him- and because he did not live according to the _mnhei’sahe,_ no Romulan would call him one of their own either. There was no word for a man like him, except, perhaps, _mistake_.

Crozier stared at the stars until they burned themselves into his eyes like dead pixels on a dark screen. The lights in his quarters were at 10%, but he could not sleep. He felt sick. Angry. Violent. God, to think he had done it. To think he had asked her _twice_ , thinking he was safe from this, thinking _she_ was safe from _him_.

If he had known then what he knew now . . .

“Captain’s log,” he said. “Stardate 2247.05. Terror’s status remains unchanged. Crozier out.”

Isolation. That must be it. It was not the Romulan way to repress one’s natural instincts- that was a purely Vulcan invention. It was why they endured biological cycles that Romulans were rarely troubled by. They denied it, and, in the denying, made the instinct stronger. Crozier’s hand tightened on the arm of his chair. Denying himself, it would seem, had played games with his biology. Games that could drive him to do things- unspeakable things- if he were not careful. If he did not mind himself.

 _You are Romulan,_ she had said. There was love in her voice when she said it, but regret, too. She was right to refuse him.

Crozier shut his eyes and groaned long and low through his gritted teeth. It would not do to dwell on her. Not now. Not when his mind’s eye so desperately needed to be turned towards the Terror’s situation. It was time they began beaming volunteers off her, onto Erebus. He would need to have Number One write up a list . . .

Crozier was just considering this when his cabin door slid open with its customary hiss. He didn’t look up. Only CMO McDonald, Crozier himself, and his steward, J’opson, had an override for the captain’s quarters. The only men on board who knew of his mortifying state- the headaches, the aggravated temper, the nighttime emissions. The only ones who could be permitted, at this time, to know.

“Ah, J’opson,” Crozier muttered, sitting a little straighter in his chair. He’d quite forgotten he buzzed for him.

“Sir.”

Crozier saw J’opson’s face reflected in the cabin window. His face was pale, his ears, pointed. His hair was perhaps slightly longer than the customary Vulcan cut, and his face was set in an attitude of polite tranquility. Crozier envied J’opson’s restraint. Surely the man must experience this very thing regularly, every seven years or thereabouts, and yet in all the years Crozier had known him, J’opson had been the very picture of self-discipline. He meditated every morning, and adhered to the teachings of Surak. The indignities of Pon Farr had yet to trouble him. At least as far as Crozier knew.

Crozier was not so lucky. McDonald had said that the headaches were only the beginning- that this natural affliction would only grow worse if no solution was found.

 _Solution._ The word tasted rotten in Crozier’s mouth.

“Please inform Number One that I’ll be calling an officers’ meeting during the alpha shift,” said Crozier to his steward’s reflection. “I’ll need to speak to him about beaming volunteers off Terror.”

“Right away, sir.”

“And another Saurian brandy.”

“Yes, sir.”

J’opson bowed, a slight inclination of the head, before making his exit. Crozier lowered the lights to 5% and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He was a man accustomed to feeling ill at ease, but now that feeling grew exponentially with every passing day. He found himself waking at all hours of the night, sweating through the sheets with his heart beating fast in his side.

Crozier grimaced. He did not think he could bear it if Admiral Franklin beamed over for dinner again during the alpha shift. The thought of being subjected to another of Fitzjames’ self-righteous sagas about being shot by the Klingons had him feeling downright murderous.

His mouth still tasted like the last glass of brandy. Perhaps a third one would do the job.

J’opson returned not ten minutes later to test that theory, Saurian brandy in hand and Neptune padding along at his heels. Crozier forced a smile and beckoned the dog closer. The smile soon became a genuine one as he stroked the soft spines on Neptune’s back. Neptune’s antennae flicked his face. Crozier offered a hand, “Shake,” and solemnly shook the presented paw. “There’s a lad. Good boy.”

The sound of J’opson pouring a glass made Crozier look up, and the thought of a dog perking at the sound of dinner drained him of his meager happiness. He knocked the glass back quickly to distract himself, uncaring if J’opson saw. “J’opson,” he said, somewhat hoarsely. “What have you heard from Mr. Diggle?”

J’opson raised an eyebrow. His face remained impassive but for a now-familiar sparkle in the eyes. “Me, sir?”

“J’opson. You hear everything.”

J’opson, who had been leaning over the table to pour Crozier a second glass, drew himself up to his full height. “No news as of yet, sir,” he said. “Engineering- Mr. Diggle, that is- has been unable to determine if the cause of the malfunction is interior or exterior. Though I imagine Mr. Blanky could keep you more informed on the matter, sir.”

Crozier grunted noncommittally and rolled his new glass idly between his hands. The food replicators hadn’t been working quite right since the ion storm and Mr. Diggle hadn’t the faintest idea what to make of it. Now they only managed a grayish, protein-dense meat paste with an metallic flavor that made Crozier’s tongue tingle at the mere memory of it. It was the same on Erebus, though according to their Mr. Wall, if it hadn’t killed them yet it wasn’t likely to anytime soon.

It was merely one more problem in a long, long line of problems. From the discontent of the men to Admiral Franklin’s wavering judgement to the way Mr. Hickey had met Crozier’s eye when they shared a drink in the briefing room. Unease prickled along Crozier’s spine at the memory.

“Is there anything else that you require, sir?”

“Sleep,” Crozier muttered. He opened his eyes. “Sleep and relief from this blasted headache.”

“I can offer you both, sir. If you would allow it.”

Crozier gave him a wan smile. “Thank you, lad. But no. That’ll be all.”

J’opson nodded once, then withdrew, the door hissing shut behind him. Crozier closed his eyes and exhaled heavily through his nose. It was not the first time J’opson had offered to meld their minds to give Crozier sleep. It was not the first time that Crozier had been tempted. He was a man well-versed in resisting temptation; it was how he got into this state in the first place.

Still, his situation was not entirely hopeless. It might be that his particular circumstances- his half-Romulan blood- might give rise to a Pon Farr that brought with it a violent urge rather than a procreative one. It might be simply endured. An agony, sure, but Crozier was no stranger to agonies. There were other solutions than the unspeakable. The outcome was far from certain.

There was yet a possibility that he might ride it out.

☆

Crozier awoke hard and trembling, every muscle sore with tension as his stomach clenched and unclenched itself in knots. He had not been so hard since before he began drinking; he turned his head and pressed his face into his pillow, swearing violently. Crozier shoved his underclothes down with one shaking hand and gripped his prick hard, rolling over to brace himself against his berth with his other hand. His thoughts were confused, flurried. He was not wholly conscious of being awake, nor of what time it was, or how long he’d been sleeping. He knew only that there was a need, one that he felt as urgently as a drowning man needs air.

He shut his eyes tight and clenched his jaw, his teeth grinding together. This too would pass. It would.

Crozier’s hand on his prick was far from enough. He could slake the desire, but not satisfy it. His mind was burning like a magnesium flare. He could not think at all, let alone think rationally. He had been caught off-guard in sleep. His defenses, such as they were, were lowered. He wanted to fight someone.

He wanted to _fuck_ someone.

 _Not gently,_ Crozier thought, feeling himself beginning to sweat. He worked his prick harder, faster, moving from the wrist. _Christ, J’opson would kneel for me if I asked._

He groaned, pressed his forehead to his sheets. No, he would not do it. Would not even think of it. It did not matter if J’opson was willing. He was under Crozier’s command.

Dear James, then. With Ross there had never been any fear of judgement, nor of humiliation. He had only ever offered Crozier his friendship and his respect, regardless of blood. In his eyes Crozier had been neither man nor Romulan. He had simply been dear Frank, and that was that. And yet, though they’d shared a profound kinship- stronger, perhaps, than any Crozier had yet known- Crozier had never felt the stirrings of lust for the man. Only the deepest of affectionate regard. James had . . . _James . . ._

Crozier’s hand slammed down on the rail of his berth, gripping it hard.

James, James, Fancy Fitzjames. The way he watched Crozier over the dinner table, the way he _pitied_ him. The way he filled Crozier’s head with stories as though to antagonize him, to goad him into making a fool of himself in front of Franklin. The way he smelled of rose oil instead of brandy and sweat.

Crozier unclenched his hand from the rail. His fingers had left deep grooves in the metal.

It would not do to think of Starfleet’s golden boy now. Not when he would rather strangle the man than take him. This, surely, was the inherent violence of Pon Farr raising its ugly head. Crozier had no intention of indulging it. No matter how dearly he longed to put his hand on Fitzjames’ throat and . . .

Crozier snarled through his teeth and shut his eyes, stroking himself harder. He struggled to turn his mind to better days, gentler memories that might not shame him to relive.

 _Sophia_. His lovely, pragmatic Sophia. Crozier remembered that warm, rainy afternoon of a long-ago spring, when he had been alone with her for the first time in weeks. The way she had looked at him. The way she whispered, for his ear alone, that her mind invariably turned to him when she made use of her hand late at night. That it would give her great pleasure to know he did the same on his long, lonely voyages into the black. Thinking of her. Thinking of each other, perhaps, at the same time, a thousand lightyears apart.

They had never made love. Sophia had held his hand, had kissed him chastely and far from chastely. But he had longed, and done nothing, and neither had she, and now he was alone and she was alone and she didn’t even know where he _was_.

Crozier never used to sweat like this when he stroked himself, not even when he was young. He was accustomed to bringing the act to a swift and unremarkable conclusion, but tonight his frustration threatened to consume him. His hand felt laughably inadequate. Lacking a willing partner, his hand was all he had.

Crozier groaned long and low in his throat and stroked himself harder, trying to wring some _result_ from his aching cock. He thought of Sophia’s clever hands exploring him for the first time, how solemn, yet eager she would be. He thought of kneeling beneath her skirts to offer her his mouth. _“Frank,”_ she would squeal with delight, her eyes warm with desire. “My uncle will _hear.”_

But in this dream, Crozier didn’t care if her uncle would hear. In this dream he was a man worthy of her, a handsome and daring man, who didn’t care about such things. Let him hear. Let him know how well a green-blooded bastard pleases his niece.

Crozier bared his teeth at the thought, grinning with outright hunger as pleasure made his muscles ache with tension. God, she would be warm and wet on his tongue. Welcoming him, holding him in place with her beautiful legs and shuddering as he loved her with his mouth. And at the very cusp of her pleasure- Crozier groaned, pressing his face against his pillow to stifle the sound- at the very cusp of her pleasure, that was when he’d take her. He’d lay her out on her back in their marriage bed and sink into the tight, wet heat of her, and she would put her arms around his neck and whisper words of love to him until he was spent.

He spilled his seed in his hand like that, feeling like a lonely, miserable wretch of a man. To think he had entertained such fantasies, knowing all the while who- and what- he was. He could never be a gentle lover to her. That was not the way a Romulan took his bride. The momentary haze of pleasure from his self-abuse quickly dissipated in the face of a feverish, violent hatred.

 _God,_ how he hated his father. The savage joy Crozier took in disregarding the sacred _lyrrveoth-_ that, _that_ was distinctly human of him. Crozier clung to that with a kind of hysterical pleasure. His father was a bastard and deserved to be remembered as such, whether it was the Romulan way or not.

Someone was hailing him. The whistle from the box on the wall pierced Crozier’s brain with its volume; he shoved his prick hastily into his pants and dragged himself from his berth. He stabbed the heel of his hand at the response button. “Crozier here.”

_“Captain Fitzjames requests your presence abroad Erebus. Immediately, sir.”_

_“Fvadt,”_ Crozier muttered, his thumb firmly on the mute button. He released it. “Have Mr. Blanky ready the transporter room and inform Number One that he’s to meet me there at once.”

_“The captain has ordered that no one is to beam aboard until such time as he sees fit, sir. He has instructed that you are to take the shuttle.”_

Crozier’s lips parted in surprise. For a moment, he said nothing. Then, “Understood. Crozier out.”

☆

The Faraday was the last of Terror’s Class F shuttlecrafts, and the only one that remained serviceable in the wake of the ion storm. Even then it was fit for short distances only; the most it could hope for was the ever-widening gap between Erebus and Terror. Crozier suspected it could manage roundtrips between the ships and the nearby ice planet as well, but he had yet to test the theory.

Some thirty-odd Erebites were waiting to receive them in the docking bay, their faces grim, their attitudes that of men direly in need of instruction. Faraday could carry six and a pilot, but Crozier had brought only three, and they disembarked one after the other, each in varying states of concern about the lateness of the hour and the possible reasons for the urgency. Terror’s Number One, Edward Little, was a somber, melancholy man with nervous eyes. He followed closely behind Crozier as they disembarked, followed by Chief Engineer Blanky- blue-skinned and silver-haired- and Mr. Tozer, his head of security.

Fitzjames was waiting for them just outside the docking bay, damn him. He had changed his eyeshadow. Navy blue today, rather than the nebulous violet to which Crozier had become accustomed. His face was bone-white, and grimmer than Crozier had yet seen it. He caught Crozier’s eye and Crozier looked steadily back at him. He hoped that look burned.

“What’s all this about?” Crozier demanded, keeping his voice admirably steady given the circumstances. “Why didn’t Admiral Franklin send for me himself?”

Fitzjames _flinched._

That was unexpected. Crozier had never known the man to flinch.

“We have lost Sir John,” he said shortly. It was only then Crozier saw that his eyes were red-rimmed, and his voice was hoarse, as though from weeping. Or screaming.

Crozier gestured wordlessly for him to lead the way. Fitzjames turned, and they walked side by side down the long halls of the ship towards the transporter room. It was always quiet during the gamma shift, particularly now that there was nothing to do, nowhere to go. There were very few people about.

“We beamed an away team down with Lieutenant Gore to investigate the humanoid signals we found on the planet’s surface,” said Fitzjames, by way of explanation. He sounded shaken. “We . . . Not all of them were successfully beamed up. There was an incident. Mr. Goodsir seems to think something may have beamed aboard with them.”

“Beamed aboard with them?”

“An alien life form. It’s unclear . . .” Fitzjames hesitated, uncertain. “There was . . . a woman, there. And her father.”

The woman in question was kneeling in the corridor outside the transporter room, dressed in a strange, wildly out of date spacefaring uniform, with a similarly dressed man, much older than her, held in her arms. She was speaking to him, whispering frantically, but Crozier could see from his bloodless face and his stiff limbs that he was dead. CMO Stanley, looking tired and a little bit bored, was standing over her with his medical tricorder, while Goodsir stood some ways behind him, looking chastened, but wary.

“Just you, Francis,” said Fitzjames dully. He walked past her and approached the sliding door of the transporter room.

 _Francis,_ Crozier thought. Something nasty and violent twinged in his heart. _He thinks he can call me Francis._

The door slid back with a pneumatic hiss and Crozier felt the cold bite into him, knife-sharp, prickling his skin into gooseflesh. Fitzjames did not shiver, but he tucked his hands under his arms for warmth as he led Crozier into the transporter room. Thick, opaque ice had formed on every surface. The walls, the ceiling, the console. It spread out in wild, organic fractals from the platform itself, obscuring the floor entirely. The surface cracked and spiderwebbed beneath Crozier’s boots. His breath hung in the air.

The ice on the transporter pads was black with blood.

“Only a handful of Gore’s party survived the beam up,” said Fitzjames. Crozier could not look at him. “The girl among them. When we beamed up her father, the ice came with him. Like an explosion of frost, radiating outward . . . Sir John . . . Admiral Franklin, I mean . . . he . . .” He swallowed. “We don’t know what this ice is. We don’t know what happened down there.”

Crozier looked at the black ice and felt nothing but a dull, despairing weight in the pit of his belly. Slowly, he turned and left the frozen deck. Fitzjames followed, silent and wraith-like, at his heels. They breathed a mutual sigh of relief when the door swished shut behind them, and they looked at each other, as if to say, _and then there were two._

The woman they had beamed up from the planet’s surface was still kneeling in the corridor outside, her father all but cradled in her lap. The blood on his uniform had spread, and he wasn’t moving. Number One and Des Voeux looked up as Crozier and Fitzjames entered. Both stood at attention along with Tozer. Blanky remained leaning on the wall, arms crossed, antennae flicking in agitation.

Crozier jerked his head over his shoulder. “Have a look,” he said hoarsely. “Tell me what you see.”

Blanky nodded once and brushed past him to enter the transporter room. A moment later he returned with a grave shake of the head. “Looks a bit like something’s exploded,” he muttered, for Crozier’s ears alone. “Only it can’t have, can it. What the hell happened down there?”

“Sir, if you’ll permit me . . .” Goodsir said, very quietly, from behind Stanley’s shoulder. “You carry a universal translator, do you not? She will not allow us to move her, or . . . or her father to the med bay, but perhaps-”

“Then she can die in the corridor, same as he,” said Stanley in a distant, distracted voice. He was studying his tricorder. “She is human, certainly. And she appears to be in good health. What can account for her father’s death, I cannot say.”

“A transporter malfunction,” said Blanky, looking back at the door. “Same as Admiral Franklin, I expect. Discorporated him across the black. Some bits here and some bits there, if you follow me.”

“Damn it all, that doesn’t explain the ice,” snapped Des Voeux.

He was scared. Crozier could not blame him. He withdrew his universal translator from his pocket and knelt in front of the woman, giving her the most reassuring smile he could manage. Her eyes, when she looked at him, were cold. Distrusting. Angry, and rightly so. She lifted her hand and gestured for Crozier to come near. He did so, holding out the translator for her. “Speak,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t understand his words. “Please. Tell us.”

The woman would not take the translator from him, but she leaned forward to speak. Her voice was very quiet, hoarse from crying and grief. Crozier recognized it to be a human dialect, but not one with which he was familiar. He caught Blanky’s eye and Blanky shook his head, equally unsure. Behind him, Goodsir’s eyes had not left the blood on the woman’s uniform. Crozier did not know the man well, but he knew him enough to know that he would find it hard to forgive himself for whatever happened down on the planet’s surface.

_you- should- not- have- come- here-_

The voice of the translator was a loud, ugly croak, artificial and synthesized. It was not a modern piece of hardware, but Crozier knew it to be reliable. He held up the small, box-like device balanced on his palm so that all could hear. The corridor was silent.

_we- were- alone- too-_

_our- ship- destroyed-_

_we- have- been- alone- for- many- years-_

_mother-_

_gone-_

_brother-_

_gone-_

_and- now- my- is- father- gone-_

_because- of- you-_

_I- am- alone-_

_and- it- will- not- listen- to- me-_

Crozier’s pulse was rabbit-fast in his side. His eyes met Fitzjames’ over the universal translator. He looked stricken, torn by grief, but not afraid.

Good.

“What is it?” said Crozier, into the translator. “What will not listen to you?”

He held out the translator as it beeped through the stranger’s unfamiliar language. She looked at it, then at him, and her next words were spat from her mouth as though they choked her.

_the- thing- made- of- muscles- and- spells-_


	2. The No-Win Scenario

_An officer or crew member may be removed from active duty status if they are judged to be incapable of fulfilling their obligations as a member of Starfleet, whether for medical or psychological reasons, by either the Chief Medical Officer or by the two ranking command staff officers._

_\- Starfleet General Order 39_

☆

On his eighth birthday, Thomas Blanky’s mother took him out to see the ice.

He had never been to the Surface before and it took hold of his imagination at once. The way the mountains caught the light and refracted it like prisms, throwing rainbows a thousand fathoms long across the frigid valleys of Andoria. The fractals of ice spreading out from where his boots cracked the surface of a frozen pond. He heard no sound for miles around but for the groaning and settling of the ice. It was like a living thing, a white dragon curled around their frosty little moon.

Ever since that day, Thomas Blanky belonged to the ice. He studied it, mastered it, learned everything there was to know about its composition and behaviors. Then he brought that knowledge with him to Starfleet. It was his first love, although- as he had often purred in Esther’s ear to make her laugh- his wife was far warmer in his arms. The ice did not love any more than the sea could love. She was a cold mistress, and Blanky, her spry and laughing suitor.

This ice behaved differently.

Ice was a creeping, spreading thing. This ice seemed to sprint, making Terror groan as it threatened to warp her metal and burst her pipes. _The thing made of muscles and spells_. Crozier’s translator was not infallible. It had translated the stranger’s words literally, but not the meaning behind them. The meaning behind them became clear when the thing slipped into the break room through the air vents and shattered Ensign Heather’s skull. When it woke Number One at all hours of the night with growls and howls that only he could hear. When it lumbered, a vast and alien thing, down the corridors, only to vanish like the breath of a god in the air.

It was a physical being and a phenomenon of energy, both. It shifted forms as suited it, ice into steam into water- material and immaterial in equal measure. Atoms in a transport beam. A spray of frozen mist. The thing called Tuunbaq moved quickly, and hid well. It had abandoned Erebus for Terror and had been terrorizing the ship- _his_ ship- for days now, and it had gone on long enough.

Blanky knew ice. It was cold, impersonal. It did not hold grudges. This ice, though, seemed to _hate_ him, and so with phaser rifle in hand, Blanky decided to lead the Tuunbaq on a merry chase.

It happened deep in the belly of the ship.

He’d sent the rest of the Engineering department up to raise the alarm, call for Mr. Tozer and the rest. It was to get them out of harm’s way. Most of them didn’t have a lick of fight in them, and Blanky, frightened and grinning with the unholy delight of it, didn’t want them getting between him and a good scrap. Let the Tuunbaq find him. He would meet it head on.

Blanky could hear everything from bow to stern and he knew that it was in the air vents, a cold mist sending out its searching tendrils for him. He primed his rifle and sprinted fast through the ducts of the ship, clambering between pipes and cables with a swiftness born of years of attending to the inner workings of a starship. Behind him he heard a whistle that became a roar that became a scream, and air vent grills began shattering off the walls one by one like targets at a firing range.

“Bloody beast,” Blanky spat, teeth bared. He ducked down one of the service hatches and backed away slowly, watching as the ice began to form. “Follow me. That’s the way.”

The plan was simple; he would lure the beast up into one of the Jeffries tubes and seal it off. Certain sections could be closed off completely, better than an airlock now that Terror was GNDN. The creature would be contained, controlled. An ignoble end to their little _ushaan_ , but where matters of honor were concerned, the Tuunbaq had already proven itself a sly and deceitful opponent. Well. Blanky could be sly and deceitful too. The Tuunbaq had earned his respect. Not his mercy.

The ice had now followed him into the service tunnel, blocking off all hope of exit. Blanky raised his rifle, took aim briefly, and laid into it with heavy phaser fire. The ice vaporized into steam on contact, a sudden violent explosion of pressure and mist, and the Tuunbaq howled. Blanky saw it coagulating in the air, reforming itself into a corporeal shape, and he took that opportunity to run for the nearest Jeffries tube and hoist himself up inside.

He waited, braced against the walls in the dark like a sweep in a chimney. Blanky could hear the creature shuffling around outside. He could hear Tozer’s footfalls on the other end of the ship as he ran towards Blanky’s position, flanked by security officers. He could hear every heartbeat on Terror, and he knew which one was Crozier’s.

 _Perhaps if I die, he’ll bring my blood back to Andoria,_ Blanky thought. Then, _nah, bugger that. If I’m dead, Frank’s got no chance._

Ice was forming near Blanky’s feet, threatening to follow him up into the tube. Slowly, without any sudden movements, he shifted his rifle onto one arm and drew his _ushaan-tor_ with the other. It was a good one, and it cut cleaner than the _Kumari._ Just the thing for a creature made of ice.

“Come on, then,” Blanky muttered, and the tube collapsed with him inside.

☆

The gym was empty at this late hour and Fitzjames took advantage of the chance to work out his aggressions. There were bags of sand hung up for the striking; he had been laying into one for nearly a quarter of an hour. He realized that he had stopped breathing, perhaps for a minute or more, and he leaned heavily on the hanging bag to catch his breath.

It would not do to lose himself. Not now. Without Admiral Franklin, without Francis bloody Crozier, the weight of the expedition entire weighed upon Fitzjames’ shoulders, and those of his Number One, Le Vesconte. The crew was demoralized, overcrowded, and scared. Chief Engineer Blanky had successfully contained the creature in one of Terror’s Jeffries tubes but the victory had come at a brutal cost.

Terror’s chief engineer had been torn to pieces, and very nearly died. His left leg could not be saved, nor, said Dr. McDonald, could his antennae, both of which had been torn raw from his scalp. Blanky had been sedated, and had slipped into sleep still gasping that he was deaf, _deaf._ He could not hear anything that was not in the room with him. He claimed that he could no longer hear Crozier’s heartbeat, and demanded to know if he were alive or dead just before he slipped into unconsciousness.

It was a demoralizing event that somewhat dampened his victory over the Tuunbaq. The specter of the creature haunted the ships still. No one knew how to kill it.

Fitzjames had never seen anything like that beast. Nor had Goodsir, the closest Erebus had to a xenonaturalist. The Tuunbaq, as the stranger had called it, was utterly alien, and wildly different from any form of life they had yet encountered. It terrified the men. A grim mood had descended on the ship, worse even than on Terror, where only a handful of crew members remained. The rest had volunteered to beam over to Erebus. Perhaps they did not want to share their ship with the beast, or perhaps they simply trusted Fitzjames’ judgement more than they did their lush of a captain.

Fitzjames gave his head a little shake, trying to clear his mind. He beat the hanging bag until his knuckles bruised. He gave it a hard roundhouse kick and the bag swung back and forth wildly. He had to catch it and hold it still. Not bad; a kick like that could break a man’s ribs. Fitzjames felt like breaking a few ribs right about now. There were a lot of things he wanted to do.

He did not want to be alone.

That was the captain’s burden, and yet, Fitzjames had not been prepared for it. Admiral Franklin was gone. Goodsir, with whom a good conversation could always be had, was on Terror. Fitzjames had the stranger shuttled over and Goodsir followed her, ostensibly to assist CMO McDonald in his medical bay. Stanley had not accepted the stranger in his own, citing foreign contaminants. Fitzjames admired the man- liked him, even, having known him before he was ruined by the world- but if he had truly been concerned with foreign contaminants, he would have worried more about alien contagions carried by the Tunnbaq than one more patient in his medical bay.

Bridgens was his steward. Dundy, no matter their friendship, was under his command. He could not _talk_ to him. Not the way he had talked with Admiral Franklin.

That left only Crozier.

Alcohol withdrawal.

Terror’s Number One was a damned fool if he thought Fitzjames would believe that for a second.

It was selfish and irresponsible for Crozier to let himself come to this. It was tantamount to being drunk on duty. Fitzjames knew him to be a competent man, and a capable captain. He had so looked forward to meeting him. Impressing him, even. Earning his favor. And what did he find instead but a man who’d made himself so damn unlovable that he’d set off a biological failsafe almost _unheard of_ in Romulans.

He should have been informed. J’opson would not betray Crozier’s trust, not even if Fitzjames questioned him under orders, but McDonald would confirm it if asked. For the good of the service.

Fitzjames ached all over from exertion. He was sweating, tired. He abandoned the punching bag and toweled himself off, making his way to the lift as he did so. The halls were empty at this hour, except for the occasional member of the night crew. They saluted as he passed, and he nodded, distracted. When he had safely returned to his quarters he locked the door behind him and leaned heavily against it, eyes closed, breathing hard.

It was an uncomfortably fascinating idea. A Romulan Pon Farr. Fitzjames wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of such a thing before. Crozier was the most human man he’d ever known, and it was difficult to imagine him pacing his rooms, glaring at nothing, breathing hard as he tried to think of anything, anything else.

Fitzjames opened his eyes. _Think of anything, anything else._

Erebus’ situation, yes, that was it. The grim atmosphere that had settled on both ships. Fitzjames intended to do something to cheer them.

Shore leave.

A Carnival of Stars on the surface of their frosty little planet. Safe, now that the Tuunbaq had been contained. They could bring the stranger down with them, let her breathe the native air again. Fitzjames was no stranger to carnivals, parties, amateur theater productions. It would be just the thing to lift the men’s spirits, and their spirits sorely needed lifting.

Of course, that was not the only reason to send most of the men ashore.

Fitzjames entered the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. He set a comb and a bottle of rose oil on the edge of the sink, and stepped into the shower. No, the other reason was simple- Terror was on death’s door, but there was a chance, a very real chance, that Erebus’ communications could be brought back online. The repairs required would disrupt the ship’s life support functions for some time, long enough that Fitzjames preferred that she be managed by a skeleton crew of engineers while the rest were shuttled down to the planet’s surface.

 _Communications._ It was more than he’d dared hope for. Perhaps they could send a signal back to Starfleet, or, failing that, to Sir James Ross, who was closer and would surely come for them with a whole fleet at his back.

The pleasant vibrations of the shower shivered through him, making his fingertips tingle. Fitzjames closed his eyes against the light and leaned his back against the wall. There would have to be costumes. Fitzjames knew for a fact that Erebus held whole trunkfuls, everything from Shakespearian theater garb to Andorian ice-cutting armor. More than a few of his men were likely to make their costumes themselves. Fitzjames would be lying if he said he wasn’t looking forward to seeing the results.

The soft buzzing of the shower faded into silence, and Fitzjames, feeling clean and pleasantly alert, stepped out and began to wet the comb with rose oil. He attended to his hair in silence; this ritual was one of his particular indulgences, and it afforded him a feeling of normalcy he may not otherwise have had. After he finished he rinsed the comb and set it aside, and began to wonder about a costume for himself.

Fitzjames left the bathroom and turned down the lights to 10%, the better to see the stars. He kept his spare uniforms stowed in a trunk beneath his bed. This he now drew out and opened, finding at the very bottom a set of women’s command golds. He shimmied into them with no small amount of difficulty and stood admiring himself a while in the glass.

Fitzjames tugged the hem down as best he could; still it rode too high. It did not flatter him, and yet his heart was too full to care. He looked well in it. Yes, he looked well in it, and the longer he studied himself in the glass, the more he realized that he did not dare risk being seen dressed like this in public. Not by his men. Not by Crozier’s men. Not by Crozier himself, whose respect Fitzjames needed. This was not a costume that demanded respect.

No, Fitzjames thought, as his thumb traced the edge of his command insignia. Not a costume. Fitzjames knew all about costumes. This was a uniform.

Crozier would flush the fiercest shade of green if he saw it. Fitzjames’ smiled slightly at the thought, then shook his head. It would not do to have fun at Crozier’s expense, not when his situation- if Fitzjames’ suspicions were correct- was so dire. Crozier was a joyless drunk, a calloused wreck who did not behave like half the man Fitzjames knew him to be. But he was also a man whom Fitzjames deeply admired. A man he, at one time, would have done anything for.

Fitzjames swallowed grimly. He ought to check on the man, see that he was not too ill. That McDonald had the situation well in hand. The only woman for lightyears around was the stranger, after all, and he knew that Crozier was too much of a good man to attempt anything with her. He’d be desperate by now. _Desperate_.

No. It would not do to wear this. Parading about in such a uniform would only embarrass and shame him in front of Crozier, and Fitzjames was a man particularly attuned to shame.

 _Besides,_ he thought, as he sat on the edge of his bed to remove his boots. _Think of the arctic climate._

☆

CMO McDonald was a handsome man, kind and even-tempered, and he spoke with a slight regional burr that made Goodsir think of home. He was courteous to the stranger, as he was with all his patients; pragmatic, often blunt, but never calloused, and he was well liked by all who knew him.

It surprised Goodsir, then, that Mr. Cornelius Hickey seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. Hickey watched McDonald not with admiration or interest, but with something like suspicion. He did not blink but stared until his eyes watered as McDonald moved his medical tricorder across both pupils, watching them shrink and expand. Hickey’s hands clutched hard at his armrests. His knuckles were white.

This was very odd behavior, as he had brought his complaint to McDonald himself rather than waiting to be called in. Goodsir observed him openly, hovering ever-present just behind McDonald’s shoulder. He had been on Terror for some time now, attending to the stranger and coaxing more reluctant speech from her, but he was eager to learn, and McDonald, who had something of the schoolmaster in him, encouraged it.

“Well, Mr. Hickey,” McDonald said at last, setting his tricorder aside. “I can say with some certainty that there is nothing wrong with your eyes.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Hickey, his eyes following McDonald’s hands, “but there is.”

It had been a very odd complaint too. Hickey had claimed an extreme photosensitivity. A kind of aversion to very bright light. He could not go from darkness to light too quickly; he had begun to adjust the light in his quarters by degrees, to better suit his eyes. The medical bay was kept bright and sterile, with walls as white as new snow. Goodsir knew that Hickey must be in pain, but if he was, he did not show it.

McDonald gave Hickey a patient smile. “I can give you something to help with any migraines or headaches you’re enduring as a result, but beyond that, it is my recommendation that you simply avoid any sudden changes in light. I will inform the chief of your division . . . that would be Mr. Blanky . . .” He was distracted now, scribbling on his PADD, “. . . that accommodations for you are to be made wherever possible, insofar as it doesn’t interfere with the functions of the ship or your duties in ship’s services.”

The corner of Hickey’s mouth did a strange sort of spasm. “Is that all, sir?”

McDonald looked at him, not without sympathy. “Come back in seven days time, after these accommodations are in place,” he said kindly. “If your condition has not improved, I’ll see about something for your eyes.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Hickey, haltingly. He stood. “There’ll be no trouble if I speak to you again?”

“No,” said McDonald, frowning. “None at all.”

Hickey nodded. He brushed past Goodsir’s shoulder as he left and gave him a strange look just as the doors slid shut behind him. Goodsir watched the doors for a moment longer, half expecting them to slide open again, revealing Hickey’s staring eyes and sycophantic grin. They did not.

“An odd fellow,” McDonald said thoughtfully, returning his attention to his PADD. “And a damned odd complaint.”

“I have never liked him,” said Goodsir, very quietly. He would not have said such a thing to Stanley, but it made McDonald chuckle in amusement, and that made it worth the saying.

Goodsir ducked his head behind the curtain deviating the front of the medical bay from the back. The stranger- her name, he had learned, was _Silna_ \- lay sleeping, breathing slowly and deeply through a respirator mask that rattled with every breath. This was the first easy sleep she’d had since she boarded, and Goodsir was grateful for it. She had lived all her life on an alien planet, and the Earth-standard atmosphere of their ships was no longer easy for her human lungs to breathe.

Something touched his shoulder and Goodsir jumped. McDonald withdrew his hand. “You needn’t worry for her,” he said gently.

“I know,” said Goodsir. “But I do.”

He let the curtain fall back into place, and watched in silence for a moment as McDonald began to set his instruments in order. “May I ask . . .” he said slowly, haltingly. “Have you observed in any of your men, ah, a line of ash? On the gums,” Goodsir gestures at his own teeth. “Just there. In the tissue.”

McDonald glanced up, his brow furrowed. "No. Are there any other symptoms?”

“Headaches,” said Goodsir, thinking back to Mr. Morfin’s complaints. Stanley had given him a hypospray to dull the pain, but he was back again two days later, complaining of a stiffness of the limbs and an increase in migraines. “Numbness. Joint pain. It wasn’t the line that troubled him . . . he would not have even noticed it had I not called attention to it.”

McDonald hummed quietly. “Well,” he said at last, giving Goodsir a fond look. “What comes first to your mind?”

Goodsir ducked his head, feeling unaccountably shy. Stanley would not have asked him. No one, except perhaps Fitzjames, would have asked him. “Chemical buildup,” he said quietly. He cleared his throat. “Buildup of a most uncommon kind, to be sure, but the color and presentation suggest long-term exposure to . . . something,” he added, somewhat lamely. “Foreign matter?”

McDonald leaned his hip against the table, arms folded. He looked thoughtful. “Does he have regular access to the fresh food stores?”

“None whatsoever. He is one of the mates; he eats only from the replicators. Why?”

McDonald frowned. “I just . . . I remember, not long ago, reading about an incident at a Federation colony where the food replicators were causing a similar vexation.”

“The replicators?”

“Yes, they were overtaxed . . . a planetwide famine resulted in a single replicator feeding whole colonies . . .” McDonald stood and began to pace, his hand over his mouth. “Have you spoken to Mr. Wall about the matter?”

“No, not yet.”

“I would advise you to return to Erebus and do so. I’ll start making inquiries myself . . . I believe Mr. Diggle is the man to speak to about such things.”

“I shall consult Mr. Wall,” said Goodsir. He glanced back at the curtain, still hanging in its place between him and the stranger.

McDonald saw him looking and his expression softened. “She’s in good hands,” he said gently. “Come back, if you like, when you’re through. Doubtless she’ll be awake by then and you’ll have a chance to speak to her.”

“Thank you,” said Goodsir. He became aware that they were speaking in hushed voices, as though afraid to disturb the quiet sanctity of the nearly-empty starship. Erebus was alive with movement and light, a constant flurry of movement as men and equipment were shuttled back and forth from the surface to the loading bay. Preparing for what the captain called his Carnival of Stars.

It would likely be several hours before the Faraday could be spared for a trip over to Terror; if Goodsir wanted to make it to Erebus before the gamma shift, he would have to put in the request now. As he turned to go, he found himself hesitating on the thresh hold. He turned back. McDonald had sat down again, his PADD in his lap. Reading. Goodsir wondered what he read, and if he ever read for pleasure.

“How did they fare?” asked Goodsir.

“Hmm?”

“The colony. At the end of it.”

McDonald looked up. “A great many people starved, or perished from complications of curable illnesses. The governor ordered that half of the colony be executed. They were dying,” His smile was bleak. “He believed the situation to be hopeless.”

“Dear god,” murmured Goodsir.

McDonald looked down at his PADD. "As I understand it, help arrived less than a week later,” He laughed bitterly. “Imagine.”

Goodsir could imagine. In the center of his mind’s eye he could see the sky filling with ships, the blinding lights, the faintest distortion of the space around them as dozens of ships leaving warp at the same time caused the sky to shimmer and flux. Bending the very light of the stars. Hope, when there was no hope to be found.

“We will fare better than they,” he said, though he was not sure if he believed it any longer. “Captain Fitzjames will see us through.”

He wished he had not said it. McDonald thought of Crozier then- he could see it in his face- and his expression became one of grim solemnity. Goodsir turned to go, feeling embarrassed, but behind him, he heard McDonald’s voice once again.

“To think . . .” he said. Goodsir stopped in the doorway. “To think that it all could have been avoided, if the governor had not believed it to be a no-win scenario.”

“Is this a no-win scenario, Dr. McDonald?” said Goodsir, without looking around.

Silence from behind him. Goodsir bowed his head, and walked out.

☆

It was late in the gamma shift when Fitzjames arrived on Terror. “The captain has taken ill,” J’opson told him, as though it wasn’t the same story Fitzjames had been fed by Ned Little. A half-truth, meant only to preserve Crozier’s dignity and blind Fitzjames to the gravity of the situation. Fitzjames knew all about half-truths, and this struck him as a particularly poor one.

“I am well aware that he’s taken ill, Mr. J’opson,” he said coldly. “I would like to speak to him regardless. _Do not,_ ” he added, as J’opson opened his mouth, “claim that he is busy.”

 _Busy,_ as Crozier used it, might well mean that he was simply sitting in the dark with his chair facing the wall. It was a small comfort then- an extremely small comfort- that the lights in the captain’s quarters were on, and Fitzjames found Francis Crozier not alone, but in the company of Thomas Blanky.

They were sitting together at the table, an open bottle between them, and Thomas Blanky had leaned in close to whisper something in a hushed tone. He looked well, considering his recent ordeal, but the sight of his healing scalp and the smooth, slate-gray metal of his leg made Fitzjames feel oddly unwell. Blanky caught sight of him and rose sharply from his seat with a muttered, “Frank.”

Crozier looked over his shoulder at Fitzjames and waved his hand in disgust. _“God,”_ he muttered. “Get off my ship.”

Crozier’s face was flushed green and he sat slumped in his chair, looking disheveled and exhausted from lack of sleep. He smelled of sweat and Saurian brandy and something else that Fitzjames could not identify, but it made his mouth begin to salivate, and his collar began to feel as though it choked him. Crozier scowled at him, and the harsh, sloping ridge of his brow made the scowl all the more severe. Fitzjames had often wondered about that ridge, if it was soft cartilage or unyielding bone. The eyes that watched him from beneath it were narrowed in a look of thinly veiled distain.

“Mr. J’opson tells me you’ve taken ill,” said Fitzjames, holding that gaze, “but I believe we both know that’s not entirely true.”

Crozier snorted, looked away. “I have the situation well in hand.”

“Francis-”

“Do _not_ call me Francis. You do not have the right. I am still your commanding officer-”

“I know you are,” said Fitzjames sharply. “You’ve finally gotten your wish, Francis. Starfleet no longer holds you in harness. You are commanding this expedition entire.”

Blanky stood back, wary, his gaze moving from Fitzjames to Crozier as though wondering which was the greatest concern. Crozier’s eyes were alert; he did not stand, but he adjusted the fit of his trousers as though they pained him and gestured vaguely for Blanky to leave the room. “Frank-”

“Oh, go smoke a pipe, Thomas!” Crozier snapped with sudden ferocity. “Go stare at the stars. I’d like a word with my _second._ ”

Blanky would not have looked more surprised if Crozier had struck him. His eyes narrowed, and Fitzjames knew that he was listening intently; he had heard it said that Andorians might pick out the heartbeats of friends and family from miles off. Blanky, though, had been rendered half-deaf by the loss of his antennae, and could no more hear Crozier’s heartbeat than Fitzjames could. With a look of grave suspicion, he took his leave, his uneven footsteps echoing behind him long after the door had slid shut.

Then there was silence. Crozier sitting, Fitzjames standing, ten thousand lightyears of difference lying between them. The air reeked of alcohol and that dizzying, musky scent that made Fitzjames’ head swim. Crozier looked at him the way he had often done across the table at officer’s meetings, his expression sullen but his eyes burning with something like malice, something like _derision._

The thought that Fitzjames was an object of derision for him- an _amusement_ \- made the blood drain from Fitzjames’ face. Damn Captain Crozier, and damn him for mocking Fitzjames with his every look, his every word. As if Fitzjames didn’t strive at every turn to earn the admiration of a man who now sat before him drunk out of his mind and neglecting his duties in favor of frigging his own prick.

“Let me be plain,” said Crozier, enunciating each word as though Fitzjames were a child. “There is nothing to be done but let the damn thing run its course, and until such time as it has, you will grant me the respect I am due to be given, and you will call me what I’m due to be called.”

Fitzjames let out a short, sharp laugh. “Respect? Francis, you had it, and you lost it through your own failure to live up to it. I see that Admiral Franklin was right about you, you, you are-”

“Gray-hearted?”

“I did not say that.”

“Do you imply that my biology has made me unfit for command according to General Order 39?”

The look in Crozier’s eyes cut him to the heart, but Fitzjames held his gaze and did not shiver. “No,” he said. “I do not.”

He wondered, somewhat uncharitably, if J’opson would have to be called in to subdue Crozier with one of those clever Vulcan neck pinches. Crozier burned with anger, absolutely seethed with it; he stood and began to pace, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides as though he itched to seize Fitzjames and throw him against the wall. He could do it, Fitzjames thought. Fitzjames was not a small man, but Crozier’s strength was extraordinary, nearly equal to that of a Romulan. He could do it.

Fitzjames’ mouth was dry. He licked his lips and stepped forward. “I do not. I imply only- no, I say outright- that you are unwell, and you are drunk,” He hesitated. “To my understanding, if this affliction is not addressed, there is a possibility that you may come to serious harm.”

“I have addressed the problem,” Crozier muttered. He continued to pace, his gaze firmly fixed upon the ground as though he could not bear to meet Fitzjames’ gaze. “I have addressed the problem, and will _continue_ to address it without any of your damned interfering.”

His pacing had brought him back to the table, and the open bottle of brandy upon it. He poured himself a glass without offering Fitzjames one. “You cannot medicate this problem with Saurian brandy,” Fitzjames said bitterly. There was no real malice in it.

“I must. It is that, or kali-fal,” Crozier smiled, insofar that a baring of the teeth could be called a smile. “My father drank kali-fal,” He raised his glass in a mock toast and drank it down in one swallow without gagging. Fitzjames’ eyes narrowed as the glass returned to the table with a dull thunk. “I’ll put a bullet in my head before I drink kali-fal.”

 _His father was a ridiculous man,_ Fitzjames thought. “I’m sorry,” he said, after a moment.

It was the wrong thing to say. Crozier’s eyes narrowed and his face colored; he looked on the verge of hurling himself upon Fitzjames and beating him senseless. “Keep your pity. Keep your respect, for that matter. I don’t need it from you.”

They looked at one another for a long moment. Crozier swayed on the spot like a midshipman without his spacelegs, his grip on the table apparently the only thing keeping him standing. Fitzjames found he did not pity him, not exactly. Looking at him now, he felt only a desperate sadness, and a fierce, angry frustration at being robbed of the captain he had hoped might one day be his friend.

He held his head a little higher. “What has McDonald told you?”

Crozier stared at him. Then he slowly lowered himself to his chair again and slumped into it. “I am a unique case,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and thickly accented with drink. “He does not know what to do with me. He says that because the . . . aggressions . . . are Romulan in nature, that perhaps a violent act will do.”

Fitzjames’ hands twitched where they hung at his sides. “A violent act?”

“Do you know what I wanted to do, when that _thing_ nearly ripped Thomas in half? I wanted to kill it. I wanted to hunt it and bring it down and snap its neck with my fucking teeth.”

Crozier met his eyes then. He looked far, far older than the man Fitzjames had known when they set out two years ago. That had been a ruined man, his heart freshly broken and the promise of a long, long sojourn in space ahead of him. Here sat the shell of what remained.

“What is that, but a violent urge?” He said, in a lifeless voice. “God damn my father. God damn every Romulan who ever turned me from their door.”

Fitzjames’ gaze softened. “I thought surely you, of all people, would know that a man is not defined by his blood.”

“There are times when I believe a man is defined by his blood to the exclusion of all else,” said Crozier, very quietly. It was a confession; Fitzjames heard it in his voice. After a moment Crozier stood up again, as though determined to endure the world standing. He swayed again, steadied himself again. He studied the bottle for a moment before turning away in disgust. “I have had such thoughts, James,” he muttered.

“Don’t call me James,” said Fitzjames, without thinking.

“It is your name, isn’t it?” said Crozier derisively. “It is your name twice over. And you have called me Francis three times now.”

Fitzjames took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. He stepped forward, and Crozier stepped back, his eyes suddenly narrowing. It occurred to Fitzjames that he had no knowledge of this condition, no frame of reference for it. Perhaps Crozier would react violently to being touched.

He raised his hands very slowly, as though in surrender. “The men cannot see you in this state,” he said, in a very low voice. “You know they cannot.”

“I know full well that they cannot.”

“You also know that the men cannot see us come to blows.”

“I am not so far gone as all that.”

“You misunderstand me,” said Fitzjames sharply. “You have heard it from McDonald- a violent act. It will have to be you and I. I am the closest you have to a man of equal rank, someone you can challenge with no . . . with no fear of what might occur.”

Crozier laughed then. It was a bark-like, humorless thing, tinged with anger. “A sparring match? A duel? You think that will be good enough?”

“If it is, as you say, a violent urge alone . . .”

His tone, perhaps, or something in the look of his eye, the movement of his throat, made Crozier’s face turn white. He seized the front of Fitzjames’ golds in one hand and thrust him hard against the wall, his arm like an iron bar, immovable. He had been slow, clumsy with drinking, but the movement had been so sudden, and had caught Fitzjames so wholly off-guard, that he had done nothing to prevent it. He simply allowed it to happen, watching it unfold as though he were a distant observer.

“I will not be gentle with you,” said Crozier through his teeth, his voice very low. “Do you understand that?”

Fitzjames smiled bitterly. “I’m made of sterner stuff than you give me credit for.”

Crozier exhaled loudly through his nose. He let his arm drop, but did not move from where he stood; there was scarcely room to breathe between them now, as though Crozier feared Fitzjames may bolt at the first opportunity. _He thinks I’ll run,_ thought Fitzjames. The thought brought with it a searing sort of glee. _He thinks I’m afraid of him._

“Fine, then,” said Crozier. He looked Fitzjames up and down, openly appraising him. “Gives me an excuse to put you in your place.”

“And what is my place, exactly?” said Fitzjames, before he could think better of it.

Crozier’s eyes darkened. Fitzjames wondered what thought had crossed his mind; if it was the same that had crossed his own. The same thought, in fact, that had crossed his mind many times before, whether at the dinner table or on the bridge or in his berth late in the gamma shift, frigging himself miserably to the thought of kneeling between Crozier’s legs. Was he wholly human down there, or did he carry some monstrous, double-ridged thing? Was it a man’s instrument or entirely Romulan in nature?

Fitzjames swallowed. Crozier’s eyes followed the movement of his throat. He said nothing.

“We’ll do it during the carnival,” Fitzjames said at last. His throat had gone very dry; he swallowed to clear it. “While the men are distracted. There are ice caves, rock formations. Plenty of places where we won’t be observed.”

He could feel Crozier’s breath hot and damp against his skin. For one mad moment, Fitzjames wondered if Crozier would put his teeth to his throat, find the soft places of his body and bite down hard.

He did not. He looked at Fitzjames with wariness, and something almost like fear, as though he were a dog expecting to be beaten. For a moment they simply gazed at each other, not speaking.

“I’ll have J’opson ensure we’re not followed,” said Crozier stiffly. “The man’s a mongoose.”

Fitzjames nodded slowly. “Very well. He will be informed, and Dr. McDonald will be informed. No one else.”

“Yes. You’re not afraid?

“I don’t scare easily,” said Fitzjames. The corner of Crozier’s mouth twitched. “I understand there are weapons of a ceremonial kind.”

Crozier smiled then. It was not mirth exactly, but amusement.

“I’m afraid that is not the Romulan way.”

☆

“Oh,” said a voice. “I was . . . I was hoping to find Dr. Goodsir.”

CMO Stanley looked up from his PADD. He checked the time; it was the gamma shift. It had been the alpha shift not five minutes ago, surely. He had meant to get up. Eat lunch, have a piss, check on his patients. Now it was the gamma shift, and he hadn’t eaten but he didn’t feel hungry. His bladder pained him but it could wait. His patients, upon recollection, were all asleep.

The man in the doorway was Mr. Collins- it was to him that the voice belonged. He was a heavyset man, very handsome, with a soft voice and eyes like a nebula. He wore his standard duty division jumpsuit and a pained expression.

“Mr. Goodsir is on Terror, playing house with Dr. McDonald,” said Stanley. He set his PADD aside and adopted an attitude of neutral professionalism. The sooner Collins could be sent away, the better. Stanley had been doing nothing. He was eager to get back to it. “What ails you, Mr. Collins? I had thought you would be ashore, helping the others with the preparations for the captain’s carnival.”

Collins was a big man, but he walked with his head bowed and his shoulders stooped, as though to make himself smaller than he was. He sat slowly in the consulting chair that faced Stanley’s desk. His eyes were downcast, troubled. He knew he wasn’t wanted.

Stanley gazed at him in silence and waited for him to speak. After a moment Collins cleared his throat and said, “I’ve . . . I’ve been in a bad way.”

“Are you with fever? Headaches?”

“No, sir. It’s my thoughts. They’re . . . flurried, somehow.”

Collins shifted uncomfortably in his chair. That was odd. Stanley did not make it a point to get to know the men- he had, in fact, failed to learn many of their names until well into their second year- but he recalled Collins as a somewhat boisterous, affectionate man. A man who spoke his mind.

The man who sat before him now seemed nervous, and unaccountably shy. He met Stanley’s gaze for a moment, then looked away. Stanley realized he hadn’t said anything for some time, and realized at the same moment that he did not care. Did the man not know that Stanley was a busy man? He was preoccupied with the Tuunbaq- it would never be truly safe on either ship, not while it yet lived in the bowels of Terror- and when he was not thinking of ways to deal with that particular problem, he was staring at nothing, and doing nothing, and thinking of nothing. It was a pastime he infinitely preferred to very nearly anything else.

“My mind is against me, sir,” said Collins. His voice was very quiet in the thick silence between them. “I sign up for all the extra work I can, but . . . have . . .” He swallowed. He leaned forward in his seat. “Have you ever been out of doors, sir? In the black?”

“I cannot say that I have,” said Stanley, who hated space and everything in it.

“There’s nothing out there,” said Collins. His hands rubbed together nervously, though the medical bay was quite warm. “Nothing at all. Yet . . . I saw . . .”

Whatever reservoir of patience Stanley may once have possessed had long since dried up. He stared at a fixed point three inches to the left of Collins’ head and waited for him to finish.

“The mind plays tricks on you, sir,” Collins’ voice was very small. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb. “Out there. It’s . . . it’s like an airlock door, and every day I fear that it will open and the vacuum will pull me out into . . . into the place where you don’t come back. The dark bits between the stars,” He looked miserably down at his hands. “I . . . I can’t stand to be alone.”

“No man is alone on a ship,” said Stanley. He picked up his PADD.

“But I feel alone,” said Collins urgently. “All the time, now.”

“Starfleet operates in space, Mr. Collins,” Stanley was already scrolling. “I’d advise you to keep busy, put your energy to positive use. Shore leave will do you good. Get your feet on the ground.”

“Sir-”

“I’m a doctor, not a psychiatrist, but if I _were_ a psychiatrist, I would advise you to turn your mind to thoughts of the captain’s carnival,” Stanley offered him a smile of dubious sincerity. “It is a prescription I support for all the men,” He looked back down at his PADD. “Cheer up. A bit of fun it what’s needed.”

“A bit of fun,” said Collins quietly.

“Just so. Think of the carnival. I have no doubt that it will set us all to rights.”

The door slid back with a sharp hiss and admitted that bumbling clown Harry Goodsir, who stumbled in with a hasty, “Sir,” before stopping, surprised, at the sight of Collins. “Dr. Stanley, sir. We need to talk. At once.”

“Dr. Goodsir,” Collins straightened up hastily, his expression brightening. “Sir, I-”

“-was just leaving,” said Stanley, setting his PADD aside with a reluctant sigh. “Thank you, Mr. Collins. That will be all.”

“Sir-”

“Good day, Mr. Collins.”

Collins looked up at Goodsir with a little desperation. Goodsir’s eyes were fixed on Stanley with a look of profound concern. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Collins,” he said distantly, his attention entirely elsewhere. “You may go.”

Collins rose from his seat slowly. It appeared to cost him a great effort. He left without looking behind him, and Goodsir at once hurried forward and sat opposite Stanley, leaning forward, his hands rubbing together in great agitation. “Sir,” he said. “It is about the food replicators.”

☆

Sleep was difficult now. Sleep had always been difficult, but now Crozier began to actively dread the act. He could not police himself while he was asleep. He had no say in his dreams.

He had spent several days angry and sweating and miserable, lying in his berth and wishing for death. J’opson attended to him to the best of his considerable ability, but beyond seeing that Crozier did not entirely forget to feed himself, his care could only comfort Crozier, not cure him. It was a pathetic state of existence. Another wretched embarrassment in the life of an embarrassingly wretched man.

The promise of a fight- finally, a warm and willing body to slake himself with- was all that kept him sane in the days leading up to the Carnival of Stars. There was a chance that that self-righteous popinjay might not roll over for him. Fitzjames might give as good as he got. A fighter, if his stories were to be believed. He fancied himself more of a Thomas Cochrane than a Zefram.

He would not be easy to fuck into submission.

Crozier strangled his scream in his throat, biting his pillow as he spilled himself hard in his palm for the third time in as many hours. His prick felt swollen and agitated, almost painful to hold. He felt sick at the touch of his own hand. He could not remember what it felt to be touched by any hand but his own.

He had looked Fitzjames in the eye and talked of _respect_. As though he, Crozier, were worthy of it after this damned rut had robbed him of a clear mind. Fitzjames was a man Crozier could imagine with green-skinned Orion boys, not a laughingstock unable to master his baser urges.

It did not matter. None of it mattered, because it would soon be over. Finally an end to it. Finally _satisfaction,_ in the truest sense of the word.

Crozier did not sleep at all that night.

Or the night after that.

Or the night after that.


	3. The Ruling Passion

_Mnhei'sahe may require you to give the last of your water to your greatest enemy, or that you kill your dearest friend._

_\- Romulan proverb_

☆

It was funny- in point of fact, it was hilarious- to think of the Tuunbaq screaming away in its makeshift prison, howling like the Devil himself every time a flesh-and-blood crewman passed by. Did it not know that they were dead men already? Did it smell the poison in their bellies and think them living?

It would have been frightening, if Dr. Stanley weren’t dead and beyond fear.

Instead, it was funny. Quite funny, actually. No one was safe, not with their bellies full of lead and their ships full of monsters. It was a no-win scenario. The only winning move was not to play.

Stanley was alone in his berth, not playing, when he heard a quiet knock at the door.

For a long moment, he simply lay there in silence. Then he raised one hand, gestured- the door slid open- and let it drop. The dim figure of a man stood in the doorway, framed by the artificial daylight of the hall. He cleared his throat with an elegant little cough. “Good afternoon, Stephen,” he said. “James has sent me to ask if you’ll be attending the carnival tonight.”

Stanley turned his head slowly to look at him. It was Fitzjames’ Number One, Le Vesconte, dressed in an extraordinary spotted tunic and boots. The ensemble gave him the look of an exotic cat loosed from its cage.

“No,” said Stanley. “I do not believe I shall.”

Le Vesconte frowned. “Very well. In that case, I am obliged to tell you that Erebus and Terror will, for the duration of the carnival, be manned by skeleton crews performing rolling restarts throughout the gamma shift. I doubt they’ll be restarting the gravity as well, but should they do so, mind you wear the good boots, eh?”

“I shall,” Stanley returned his attention to the ceiling. “Thank you, Henry.”

A hesitation. Then, “They’re trying to get communications back online, you know. James is hopeful. Very hopeful. He hoped that would cheer you somewhat.”

“Communications,” Stephen closed his eyes, exhaled sharply through his nose. “Communications with whom?”

“Starfleet, if we’re lucky. Captain Ross if we’re luckier. The man would sail across an asteroid field for Captain Crozier, god knows why.”

Silence then, as Stanley lay still and Le Vesconte tried to think of something to say to him. It was a wasted effort and both men knew it.

“Sleep well, Stephen,” he said at last. Stanley heard Le Vesconte turn in the doorway, and a rustle that may have been a flick of a cotton fiber tail. Then the hiss of the door. Then the dark. Then the silence.

Was it so silent on Terror?

Stanley was poised on the very knife-edge of sleep. He felt himself sinking very slowly, submerging himself in the black waters that lapped at the corners of his mind. It felt like falling into the dark places between the stars.

Collins had been afraid of it. What did that brute of a man know?

Stanley opened his eyes and saw darkness, same as before. He wondered if all dead men saw the world as he did, or if he was the only one. Nothing remained now but their souls, and the men said . . . well. The 23rd century was an enlightened age, and Stanley was a medical man.

But the men said the Tuunbaq ate souls.

The stranger knew something about it. The men said that when she asked to see it, she had only to come within two decks of it, and the creature began to bay for blood. She was gone now. McDonald had sent her down to the carnival under an armed guard. Let her breathe the air she was used to, he had said. She wants to see her alien world, let us return her to it.

The stranger’s visit had proved one thing and one thing only. The Tuunbaq wanted out. The Tuunbaq wanted to hunt, and kill, and consume. It would howl for any quarry. It would pursue any prey, live or dead, so long as it had a soul.

Stanley’s fingertip traced the edge of his medical insignia with his thumb. His CMO’s emergency medical override activated silently, warming the pad of his finger. He unclipped the insignia and turned it over in his hand. Over and over and over.

☆

James Fitzjames’ Carnival of Stars warmed the distant horizon, a frostbitten pavilion aglow with lights and music. It looked like a city with the windows lit. A brave little Federation settlement framed by a sky full of alien moons. High above it, looking simultaneously too vast to comprehend and breathtakingly fragile, Terror and Erebus drifted serenely through the night. Terror still listed on her side, nearly upside-down, but her lights shone in defiance of the darkness. She was beautiful. There was no evidence whatsoever that Captain Back had once wrecked her.

Looking at this tableau from such a great distance made a familiar melancholy settle on Crozier’s shoulders like a shroud. It felt indecent, somehow, to look. He felt like a boy pressing his face to the window of a sitting room, looking in on some warm, happy scene from which he must be forever barred.

They were several miles out now at least. The wind tugged at his coat and numbed his feet in his boots. The ice scraped at his soles in rough chunks, making for a hard hike, but there was a high outcropping of cliffs and sheltered ice caves in the shadow of the nearby mountains, and Crozier was bitterly determined to get there. This was a planet of sheer drops and strange, alien projections of ice, but it was also a planet full of wide, flat frozen deserts, and the last place on earth Crozier wished to be was somewhere barren and exposed.

J’opson hiked several paces behind him, carrying an all-weather lantern for the darkness and one of McDonald’s medical kits. Fitzjames had gone on ahead at first- the best walker in Starfleet, or so he claimed- but after a time he slowed his pace, and now walked side by side with Crozier, away from his own carnival. “Tell me about the _mnhei’sahe,”_ he said. They were the first words he’d spoken since they shuttled down to the planet’s surface. The transporter beams were still dangerously unstable. “I want to know why you don’t follow it.”

He was tired, his skin was prickling all over, and he felt far, far too warm despite the arctic chill, but nonetheless Crozier managed to conjure up a bitter smile for Fitzjames’ benefit. “It’s about honor, James. No point in learning the art of saving face when I’ve no face to save.”

Fitzjames gave him a sharp look. “I’ve heard that the _mnhei’sahe_ is an honorless practice.”

“Heard that one from the Vulcans, no doubt.”

“Explain it to me.”

“I have nothing to do with the _mnhei’sahe._ I despise the practice and all its meaningless intricacies. Barely understand it myself.”

“Well, I would like to understand it,” Fitzjames’ eyes were fixed up ahead as he trudged his way up a steeply inclining slope, Crozier and J’opson following close behind. _“Know thy enemy,_ and so on.”

Crozier’s smile became a little more genuine at that, though not by much. He followed Fitzjames up the incline and swayed breathlessly at the summit, on the verge of overbalancing. “Sir,” murmured J’opson very softly from behind him, but Crozier waved him off. He had no desire to be cosseted. Not now.

They had almost reached the base of the closest cliff. It projected out into the sky in jagged points like the teeth of a broken comb, and down where it met the earth, Crozier saw the icy overhangs that promised the long sought-after caves they had been marching towards. “I told you. It’s about honor,” he said quietly as they continued on, with J’opson walking dutifully behind them.

“Not only honor, though.”

“No, not only honor. The word does not translate, but attempts have been made. The killing courtesy. The ruling passion. Hate-love. Romulans say the _mnhei’sahe_ may be an act of hatred that requires you to spare your enemies life, or an act of love that requires you to kill your dearest friend.”

Crozier’s eye caught the movement of Fitzjames’ throat as he swallowed. The act made him want to close his hand around that throat, feel the knot of Fitzjames’ neck throbbing against his palm.

“Let us be glad you are not a Romulan then,” said Fitzjames.

That startled an ugly laugh out of Crozier. “I am Romulan enough for this, it would seem.”

“And man enough to retain your honor while enduring it.”

“There is nothing honorable about this,” said Crozier sharply. Fitzjames looked at him, surprised. “Pon Farr is honorless, whatever the Vulcans say. I beg your pardon, J’opson,” he added, his voice softening.

“It is all right, sir,” said J’opson, raising the lantern a little higher. It illuminated his face, making it pale and eerie in the tundra darkness. “Our circumstances are not alike.”

The wind had died down noticeably here, and the entrance to the ice caves yawned open not far ahead of them. J’opson held the lantern aloft, illuminating the opaque bluish-white of the ice. Crozier turned to Fitzjames. “I’ll leave it to you, then,” he said brusquely. “Would you have him here as a witness?”

Fitzjames’ smile looked more like a grimace. “I’ll not have him witness the beating I’ll administer you before the night’s out. The boy worships you.”

J’opson’s expression did not vary- not that it ever varied- but Crozier saw a glimmer of something like amusement in his eyes. “That’ll be all, J’opson,” said Crozier quietly, a little amused himself. He cracked his knuckles one by one. “Leave the lantern.”

☆

Silence from the bridge crew. A fraught, tense silence that carried with it the weight of expectation. Men hungry for news, for leadership. Men who were just plain hungry. The silence dragged on, broken only by the soft beeps and clicks of their computers.

“Did it work?” said a voice, very quiet. Billy Orren.

“I’m not sure,” said Fairholme.

More silence.

Fairholme adjusted his earpiece and opened hailing frequencies again. The same tired old words he had repeated numerous times now. NCC-1826 and NCC-1813 are in distress. Please respond. Hailing Captain Ross. Please respond. We are in distress. We are in distress. We are in distress.

No one could hear them. Not all the way out here. If there was one thing Henry Collins had learned on this thrice-accursed voyage, it was that distress signals tended to go unanswered.

Leave it, he wanted to say, but there was no point. Abandoning their one and only task meant there was nothing preventing them from going to the carnival, and Collins did not have the energy nor the strength of will to endure the carnival. Not now. Not tonight.

“Try it again,” he said, from where he sat, exhausted, in Fitzjames’ command chair. All eyes turned to look at him. He was their superior officer, and, at present, the commander of the Erebus while Fitzjames was ashore.

Fairholme nodded once and gestured to Billy Orren. “Inform Engineering. We’ll need to continue performing rolling restarts as long as we keep sending out hailing signals.”

Collins closed his eyes. He nodded, just once. “Yes. Inform Engineering.”

The men around him, all engineers themselves, performed their duties admirably. Collins would expect nothing less from them. They were better men than he. Stronger. More capable. Stout of heart and mind.

Collins leaned back in Fitzjames’ chair, his eyes still closed. It was easier if he was sitting down. It was easier if he closed his eyes.

This time, he opened them.

He didn’t know why.

It was a very bad thing to be an engineer who was afraid of rolling restarts. The ones they’d been doing all day weren’t real shutdowns, but they jumpstarted as much as they dared without jeopardizing either their oxygen or the stability of the dilithium on both the Erebus and the Faraday. It lasted for fifteen seconds. Collins didn’t breathe for the whole thing.

The lights went out.

His eyes sought out the lights on the consoles, the buttons, the reflected gleams on the handrails. They pierced his eyes like needles, made them blink and water. His heart dropped out from under his ribs and he felt himself rising, falling into the darkness. That’s the gravity gone, then. Ten seconds. Five. Collins closed his eyes and he was a hanged man, suspended. Night had crept onto the bridge. The dark places between the stars yawned open and Collins fell until his bones froze and shattered into atoms.

It was an eternity before he settled back into himself. He looked at Fairholme and fifteen seconds had passed. “Send it again,” he said. His voice was steady. He had done rolling restarts a hundred times before, a thousand. He was not afraid.

Fairholme nodded and returned to the communications desk. Collins stared at the viewscreen ahead of him, and the small, icy planet that looked so vast at the center of their scanners. He could not see the lights of Fitzjames’ carnival from here, but he knew they were there. Tents full of people drinking and laughing. Talking of better days and planets far, far away from here.

“Sir,” said Billy Orren. “There’s no word from Engineering.”

Collins rotated the seat to face Orren. “What was that, Billy?”

“It’s Engineering, sir. They’re not answering.”

Collins exhaled softly. He stood up. His boots rested firmly on the deck. Might have been solid ground, rather than the deck of a starship a thousand lightyears from home. “Another problem,” he said to himself. "Right. I’ll go and have a word with them. Fairholme, continue the transmission.”

“Aye, sir,” said Fairholme. He watched Collins leave, then picked up his earpiece.

☆

Two celestial bodies, circling. So it had always been.

Circling the dinner table. Circling the bridge. Circling this cold, dead planet with a single point of light- a carnival, which neither were attending.

It was a dark, secluded ice cavern. Wide enough for a tussle but narrow enough for the goddamn _scent_ of him to make Fitzjames’ soul turn on its axis. J’opson had chosen their location well. He wondered briefly- perhaps uncharitably- if J’opson could smell Crozier’s rut the way Fitzjames could.

Interest and excitement had made Crozier’s skin flush. He was a terrible man, Fitzjames thought, as they circled one another in silence, illuminated by the harsh light of the all-weather lantern. Terrible and kind and dangerous.

Now there was no one else. No J’opson to tend to Crozier’s headaches, no Dundy to talk Fitzjames down from his ledges. Now it was just the two of them, the challenger and the challenged. Each with hot blood and twitching hands, each with wandering eyes. Fitzjames was aware that this was something old that they were doing, something sacred, but it felt no more alien to him than Crozier did.

Fitzjames’ hands twitched, curled into fists. It did not matter how green his blood, how heavy his brow. Crozier was only a man. He carried a man’s instrument between his legs and a man’s mind between his ears but oh, he smelled of some wild, alien thing that made Fitzjames’ mouth go dry, that made his vision go red, that made him want to press Crozier into the wall and love him until he shattered.

“Honorless,” he said. He was surprised to find that his voice was rough from disuse. He wondered how long they had been circling each other, alone in that dark cavern. “What an odd thing to say.”

Crozier leapt at him.

He was not fast, but he was sudden; so sudden that he nearly had the advantage of Fitzjames right from the start. Fitzjames threw a hasty blow at him but Crozier ducked in under it, seizing his wrist and going for his throat with the other hand. Fitzjames blocked it with his free hand, shoved him back. Already his arms ached where Crozier had touched them. He gripped like iron, cold and unyielding.

Crozier leapt at him once more and Fitzjames planted his feet, struggling with him. Their boots skidded on the ice. Fitzjames grunted, breathing hard; he threw Crozier off once and ducked, weaving around him. He was no wilting maid, but his strength was nothing to Crozier’s. He backed away slowly, feeling his way blindly along the wall with one hand.

Crozier grinned, and Fitzjames found himself returning the smile. He stepped to the side when Crozier lunched for him but Crozier’s fist caught him in the right side of his ribs. He gasped, and Crozier’s elbow found his jaw, hard, and then he was pinned, Crozier’s face inches from own and his breath hot and damp against his skin. His eyes were gleaming with triumph, and only gleamed brighter when Fitzjames slammed his knee into his belly, sending him reeling. Blind with something like hatred, something like delight, Fitzjames leapt for him and got his arm in a lock. They staggered for a moment, each attempting to wrestle the other off, before Crozier kicked Fitzjames’ legs out from under him and sent him sprawling. The impact knocked the breath from his lung. He felt his command golds tear on the sharp ridges of ice.

He grinned with bloody teeth and looked up at Crozier. He wiped his bleeding lip on the sleeve of his golds. “Francis,” he said. “God, Francis. Look at you.”

Crozier advanced on him, chest heaving, looking murderous. Fitzjames pushed himself slowly to his feet and backed away, watching for any sudden movements. “There is nothing dishonorable in this,” he said, because now, for some reason, it felt more important than anything else in the world that Crozier _understand._ “You said it yourself, you have no face to lose. This is . . . fighting you is an honor. An _honor.”_

“You self-righteous bloody prick,” said Crozier. His voice was unsteady. “You don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand,” said Fitzjames, and Crozier slammed him into the ground.

It was sudden and dizzying, having that boundless reserve of strength turned against him. Fitzjames felt a sudden, desperate urge to lie still and take what was given to him; he tried to scramble away instead, and got a boot in his back for his trouble. A moment later and Crozier had dropped to his knees beside him, atop him, _there._ His breathing fast and heavy against Fitzjames’ skin. He got a knee in Fitzjames’ back and an arm around his throat, forcing his head up. Fitzjames swallowed. He could feel the knot of his throat rasping against Crozier’s skin.

“There now,” Crozier muttered in his ear. His voice was surprisingly gentle, though still rough from the exertion. “Know when you’re beat, Jim lad.”

Fitzjames squirmed under him, rolling his hips by way of answer. Crozier groaned, long and low. His breath was damp on Fitzjames’ neck. He eased his grip of Fitzjames’ throat, removing his arm entirely, and before Fitzjames could scramble out from under him he had him turned over onto his back with Crozier kneeling over him, his knees planted firmly in the ice on either side of Fitzjames’ head. His hair was in disarray, his face flushed, smiling. All pretense abandoned.

“Beg.”

“Please,” said Fitzjames, without hesitation.

 _“Beg._ Give me what I’m due.”

“Please, Francis,” Fitzjames breathed, feeling pleasantly dizzy and devoid of all desire to restrain himself. “ _Please._ God, choke me with it. I’ll thank you for it. Please.”

He wanted it- he _had_ wanted it, for so very long now- and the thought that he might some so close only to be denied drove all reason from his head. Crozier kneeled over him with a savage smile and undid his belt. Fitzjames clawed at his thighs to pull him closer, close enough to finally take his prick and feel that warm, heavy heat of it on his tongue. The musky scent was intoxicating, unbearably erotic. It made his head swim, his thoughts coming in blissful, sleepy confusion. _Yes, yes, god, yes,_ he thought, feeling light-headed as he sucked at Crozier’s prick. _Yes. Fuck my mouth as you’d fuck a woman. Make my eyes roll back in my head. Make my voice hoarse when I bore you with my stories at dinner._

He dug his fingernails hard into Crozier’s thighs, leaving deep impressions that did not even make him wince. Fitzjames’ mouth was salivating; he had not known it to do that even at his most shamefully cock-hungry. He caressed Crozier’s prick with his tongue as though making love to it, and he felt, rather than heard, Crozier’s breathing change. Fitzjames’ skin was flush with goosebumps, both from the cold and a sense of terrible, exquisite danger. He took Crozier’s prick into his mouth and nursed at it eagerly as though to soothe some wild thing with pleasure. As though by lavishing his attention on that prick, he might stay Crozier’s hand from striking him, just for a moment. _Do not fight. Do not fight. See how I suck your pretty cock so well._

 _“Christ,”_ Crozier growled low in his throat. His hand fisted in Fitzjames’ hair while the other cupped his jaw, forced his mouth open and slack. Fitzjames allowed it eagerly and did not regret it; his eyelids fluttered weakly as Crozier all but crammed himself down his throat, making a place for himself there with hard, rough rolls of his hips. Fitzjames swallowed wetly around the head of his prick and Crozier made an utterly inhuman sound. His hand firmly cupped the back of Fitzjames’ head and forced it down, holding him still until Fitzjames couldn’t breathe, until tears stung his eyes and a thin ribbon of spit dripped down onto Fitzjames’ chest. Then he held him there for a moment longer.

When he pulled out Fitzjames felt a deep, wet ache in his throat. He gasped for breath and leaned forward to get his mouth on Crozier’s prick again at once. _“Hwiiy amton’wi-kha,”_ Crozier groaned. Fitzjames did not know the words but he recognized the lusty appreciation with which they were spoken. He dragged his tongue up the soft, swollen sack of Crozier’s stones, determined that if Crozier intended to take him like a Romulan bride he would have a damn difficult time prying Fitzjames away from his prick and the graying gold hair it nestled in and that _scent_ that made Fitzjames’ prick leak and twitch without ever being touched.

Crozier growled something unintelligible and stood; Fitzjames tried to follow him but he placed his boot against Fitzjames’ shoulder and shoved him roughly off. The ice stung Fitzjames’ back, numbing it. He grinned and tried to push himself to his feet but Crozier was upon him again, pinning him down, his eyes dark with something mindless and eager as Fitzjames squirmed and strained beneath him. “That’s it,” Fitzjames panted, thrusting his hips up to meet Crozier’s. “That’s it, there you are. Beg.”

Crozier let out a low, guttural groan and lowered his head to mouth clumsily at the column of Fitzjames’ neck. He rubbed his prick roughly against Fitzjames’ thigh. He said nothing.

 _“Beg,”_ Fitzjames snarled, delighted. He let himself fall slack, meek and unresisting, and the lack of feigned opposition made Crozier’s pupils dilate. He stared at Fitzjames, breathing hard, coming back to himself by degrees. “Beg. Give me what _I_ am due.”

The sudden lack of engagement, the apparent lack of _interest_ , seemed to drain Crozier’s face of color. _“Please,”_ he said hoarsely, leaning down to kiss Fitzjames’ neck again. “Please. James, I need my prick in you. _E’lev. E’lev._ Please. You must, damn you,” His voice cracked at that. _“James.”_

It was too much and not enough all at once. Fitzjames scrambled to rid himself of his uniform trousers, heedless of the ice, and Crozier, seeing this, managed to drag one of their discarded coats closer to them before sprawling Fitzjames onto his belly atop it, tussling with him with something almost like playfulness, were there not a certain viciousness in both their minds. Fitzjames throbbed with excitement, elation. He seized Crozier’s hand without thinking and clasped it tight, squeezing it to keep himself from crying out when Crozier finally, finally took him.

It was brutally painful, as he had known it would be. It was agonizing. Ecstatic. He felt pierced, conquered, split open; he couldn’t hold back a snarl through gritted teeth. It was a powerful, half-strangled thing. _Yes,_ he wanted to howl. _Yes, yes, there you are. Enjoy it. Enjoy yourself like I enjoy you, you goddamn miracle._

Crozier’s hands grasped at him, one finding his belly and the other his chest, making him shudder. There was pleasure, finally, along with the pain. Pleasure that mounted with every thrust, with every squeeze of Crozier’s hand in his. Fitzjames felt blindly behind him and found Crozier’s thigh, caressing it. Encouraging him. Crozier let out an ecstatic sigh- the relief of the addict, finally sated- and leaned down to kiss Fitzjames’ neck. His mouth was gentle on Fitzjames’ skin, but his thrusts were unrestrained and viciously deep, as though he wanted to make Fitzjames taste him in the back of his throat.

“There’s a lad,” he muttered breathlessly in Fitzjames’ ear. He pulled him up with one thick arm locked around his throat, holding him on his knees with his back pressed to Crozier’s chest. “How long’s it been since your last good, hard fucking, hm?”

“Too long,” Fitzjames grunted, his teeth bared in a smile.

“Come now,” Crozier scoffed. Fitzjames could feel his teeth pricking at his throat, worrying the skin. “As though you don’t have the handsomest lads in Starfleet lining up to roger you into the 24th century. Here now, _hnalo thlo hru'fir._ ”

Fitzjames laughed shakily, and the laugh became a groan as Crozier’s hands found his hips, digging his fingernails in hard. He pushed him down again until they lay together on the ice, tightly entangled, the violence of the earlier moments giving way to an eager, almost puppyish pursuit of pleasure. Fitzjames lay on his back with Crozier upon him. His hand sought out Crozier’s side. He laid his palm flat against him there and felt his alien heart fluttering furiously beneath the skin. Crozier’s whole body tensed and shuddered; he pinned one of Fitzjames’ hands above his head and with his other hand he held his jaw, holding him still that he might be kissed at Crozier’s leisure. “Christ, _h’levreinnye,_ ” he mumbled into Fitzjames’ mouth, punctuating the profanity with a deep, slow thrust that made Fitzjames’ leg twitch. “It’s like fucking a woman.”

Arousal jolted through Fitzjames at that and he let out an audible cry. He clutched at Crozier to draw him closer, one hand in his hair, the other groping his lower back. “God, if you knew how I wanted you,” he breathed unsteadily, his eyes falling closed with pleasure.

Crozier laughed weakly at that. Uncomfortable, embarrassed. He nipped at Fitzjames’ ear and rocked his hips more firmly into him, gentler now. A little of his desperation gone, now that he’d found a warm, willing hole for his prick. “You know,” he said hoarsely, squeezing Fitzjames’ hand- Fitzjames had not even noticed he’d failed to let go. “Vulcans . . . they like to dress it up. All these little traditions and trappings,” He forced his prick deeper and Fitzjames parted his lips for Crozier’s tongue.

“But Romulans,” Crozier’s voice was scarcely more than a low, dangerous whisper against Fitzjames’ mouth. “Romulans don’t pretend it’s anything other than what it is.”

Fitzjames’ hand roamed Crozier’s chest, enjoying the graying blond hair he found there. He struck his chest once, open-palmed, just to watch the flush rise and fade. Crozier grunted, amused, and Fitzjames did it again. Once more, and then he grinned up at Crozier, his eyes sparkling. “And what is it, Francis,” he said softly, rolling his hips up to meet Crozier’s thrusts.

“A rut,” said Crozier. His voice cracked on the word. “A filthy, honorless rut so base and embarrassing that Vulcans, clinging to their teachings of Surak, cannot bear to endure it without making it a pretty little ceremony with their bells and their weapons and their priests. They . . . ah . . .” Fitzjames’ hand had come to rest on the small of his back, his fingertips teasing him there. “They . . . they dress it up to make it bearable.”

Fitzjames smiled weakly; he felt faint with pleasure, and half-dizzy from the musk that Crozier seemed to bleed from every pore. “Must it be . . . must it be only bearable?” He breathed. He reached down and began to frig himself, but Crozier knocked his hand away and took his prick in hand, offering him clumsy, firm strokes that made him stammer through his words. “Can it not be enjoyed? Gloried in?”

“It’s . . . James . . .” Crozier said weakly. His eyes were clear and searching, his hand firm and steady on Fitzjames’ prick. “It’s not a thing to be enjoyed. To enjoy it is obscene,” He smiled bitterly, but his eyes still wore that intent, searching look. “No bride glories in her mate’s Pon Farr.”

“I do,” Fitzjames’ hands convulsed fiercely where they clung to Crozier’s back. _“I do.”_

Crozier laughed, disbelievingly at first. Then the laughter became a shuddering sigh, and his movements became rough and erratic, chasing the cusp of a sudden climax. Fitzjames clung to him and nipped at his neck, murmuring nonsense encouragements against his ear, coaxing him, goading him onward. Crozier’s grip dug painfully into Fitzjames’ arm and he felt it, the messy, desperately erotic feeling of warmth, accompanied by the sudden knowledge that Crozier had satisfied himself with him but was still firmly, magnificently hard. The realization made Fitzjames spend himself quickly after, dribbling thickly over Crozier’s fingers. He would have been ashamed, perhaps, if Crozier hadn’t looked down at him with such appreciation, and an expression of genuine wonder.

Fitzjames swallowed. He tilted his head up, and Crozier leaned down hurriedly to kiss him. “Again,” he said hoarsely against Crozier’s mouth. “Again.”


	4. The Falling Star

_Certain it is, and sure: Love burns, ale burns, fire burns, politics burns. But cold is life without them._

_\- Romulan proverb_

☆

The joyful indulgence of the carnival felt almost unholy after Erebus’ sickbay. Goodsir could not find Dr. McDonald anywhere in the throng, and after several hours of unsuccessful searching he got himself a drink and sat by himself in the far corner of the mess tent. The air smelt thickly of alcohol and salted meat and a metallic tang that Goodsir knew to be the slop that oozed from Mr. Wall’s replicators. The men had hung lanterns high in the apex of the tents, and in the mess tent the lights were a vivid tangerine orange, painting the unknown liquid in Goodsir’s glass all the colors of a Vulcan sunrise.

Goodsir drank it off. It was sweet and syrupy and it clung to the roof of his mouth. Around him men were packed in around their tables like tinned meat, or clambering over their fellows to greet a friend, or staggering in and out of the other tents that had been pitched in tight clusters all around. The mess tent was the beating heart of the carnival. It was Rome, and all roads led to it.

Goodsir did not wear a costume. He’d left it to the last minute, and by the time he’d remembered, it had been too late. He had too much on his mind to care now, and as long as he sat quietly and spoke to no one, no one paid him any mind. The costumes he saw on the men around him were outrageous. Spangled feathers, metallic bodysuits, faux-furs in artificial colors. A few wore translucent, dome-like helmets that resembled overturned fishbowls. Still others- Le Vesconte among them- had dressed as exotic animals from a myriad of Federation planets. Goodsir saw pirates from Orion, Klingon theater garb, and red, blue, and gold Starfleet uniforms accessorized with all manner of capes and cravats. John Bridgens had arrived dressed as a sehlat to the general amusement of the crew, an amusement which increased tenfold when Harry Peglar arrived shortly afterwards, dressed as Bridgens. The atmosphere was excited, ecstatic. The arctic winds buffeted the synthetic polymer of their tents, but inside all was music and drunken laughter.

Goodsir saw none of it. Felt none of it. Enjoyed none of it.

He had eyes only for her.

Silna sat apart from the crowd, same as he. She was sitting on the far end of the tent, silent as the grave, eyeing the men around her with wary suspicion. No one had noticed her, or if they did, they paid her no mind. Tozer, the beginning and end of the armed guard she was meant to be under, was half-drunk and merrily singing with the other red-shirted security officers. Goodsir watched her slowly stand up and slip away, vanishing out into the night.

The thought that this was the last he might see of her hit him so suddenly that he was unable to prevent the wave of despair that crashed over him, plunging him to a far greater depth than he had already sunk to. He stood up very suddenly, causing the table to scrape along the bare ice, and sidled awkwardly around it, hurrying towards the still-fluttering gap in the tent where Silna had made her escape.

Outside, the carnival had filled the landscape with light. The air was clear and clean and perhaps a bit thin, certainly thinner than class M standard. The carnival tents had been pitched close together like penguins huddling in the cold, and the lanterns shining through them illuminated each with a different colorful glow- violet, evergreen, cerulean. Little labyrinths connected each, or narrow, low-roofed tunnels strung with fairy lights and imitation flowers. It gave the whole the look of some absurd alien menagerie. Here were the deserts of Vulcan, recreated in the narrow confines of a Starfleet-issue extreme terrain survival tent. Here were the green hills of Ireland. Here were the caves and tunnels of Andoria.

 _Home,_ or a mere approximation of it. The lights, the warmth, the music. All beckoned to Goodsir as he walked out into the surrounding darkness, out to where Silna had seated herself cross-legged upon the ground, just outside the circle of light. She sat with her head down, her shoulders slumped and heavy. Goodsir hesitated, afraid that he would be committing some grave rudeness by interrupting.

The snow crunched beneath his boot. Silna raised her head, but didn’t look. She wasn’t moving, didn’t try to run away. After a moment she gestured for him to join her, and Goodsir sighed softly. She knew it was him, then. He sat down beside her and together they looked up at the moons.

There were three of them, all of varying sizes. Their moonlight bathed his upturned face, and though they gave off no warmth, he thought he felt a certain radiance nonetheless.

A foolish notion struck him. He patted down his pockets, seeking, and when he found it he began to unwrap it in his palm, glancing shyly at Silna all the while. _Here,_ he said. Her language was rough and halting on his tongue, but it made her smile to hear it, and that was enough reason to try. _From my home._ “Scotland,” he added, for clarification.

Silna’s eyes brightened- a faint smile. She took the little packet from him and examined it, opening it further. Nestled inside were twenty or so dried fruits, not unlike dates in color, but with a peculiar flat, circular shape, like shriveled coins. After glancing at Goodsir to confirm that they were indeed food, she bit into one, and at once her eyes widened in astonishment.

 _Yes?_ Goodsir’s heart brightened. _Good? My brother gave them to remember Scotland. Remember home. I am saving them._

He reached over, took one himself. They were dried, but the flavor remained, and the sparkle that popped and crackled along his tongue when he bit into it. He had never tasted anything sweeter, nor, he suspected, had Silna. He looked down at the remaining half in his palm, chewing silently, and thought of how this was the only food remaining on Erebus that he knew would not hurt him.

 _They are wonderful,_ said Silna. Goodsir looked up, his attention back on her. Only by listening intently could he understand her. Her voice was wonderfully clear without her respirator, but the words were a struggle to work through. She smiled at him. _I would do the same for my brother._

Her brother, who had died in the crash. Her mother, who had died trying to shield him from the flames. Her father, who had lived, and raised his only daughter on this lonely world, far from Federation space.

Silna had said he could talk to the Tuunbaq. That once, when she was a girl, he had walked right up to the thing and told it to _be kind._ And it had.

Until it hadn’t.

 _Tell me more,_ said Silna. Goodsir watched her hands- strong, sure hands, with clever fingers- as she tore one of the little fruits in two, and offered a part to him. He took it from her in a daze, reminded powerfully of doing something similar with the girl who lived above the pharmacy when he was young.

 _We all eat them there,_ he said softly. _It is traditional. Hundred years ago, men from Orion came to Scotland and planted them. Now they are all dead on Orion, but they grow very well back home. Too well. So we must eat them very fast. They are better when they are fresh,_ he admitted, thinking of the trees that grew just outside Aberdeen. _You can eat them off trees. Do you remember trees?_

_No. I was too young when we crashed. I knew nothing but our ship._

_Of course,_ said Goodsir quietly.

They sat in silence. Goodsir had always admired the beauty in silence, ever since he was a boy. Silence was hard to come by on a starship. Silence made the men think of space, so they filled it however they could. Erebus was so much noise.

 _You’re leaving,_ said Goodsir, after a while.

Silna nodded.

_See you again?_

Silence.

 _Please,_ said Goodsir, with a suddenness that surprised even him. She rose and so did he. His hand twitched, meaning to take hers, but he restrained himself. _No. Go. Be happy. Stay?_ Desperation now. _Happy with us? Rescued with us?_

The look she gave him cut him to the heart. Not sadness, exactly. Not joy.

“No,” she said, in careful, halting Standard. “I . . . am not done.”

She spread her arms wide, an expansive gesture that surprised Goodsir in its expressiveness. “Scotland,” she said, gesturing to the moons, the snowy fields, the frozen arches and high hills in the distance. “Scotland. Scotland. See?”

“Yes,” murmured Goodsir. “I think I do.”

They said no more after that. He watched her walk away, trudging into the night, her bag over her shoulder. Alone on a far distant planet untouched by man. The natural world her only companion.

It seemed, to Goodsir, like a kind of heaven.

☆

Collins was intimately familiar with the belly of Engineering. Down there the hallways were narrow, and warm with the vibrations of the ship. The air smelled faintly of dilithium- not enough to poison the air, but just enough to remind Collins that Erebus was still breathing. Even now.

It was really the only place on board that Collins felt safe.

He did not feel safe now. It was dark, darker than regulation allowed, and he heard no signs of life. Only the usual clicking and whirring. No one was at their stations. No one was in the halls. If Collins hadn’t known better, he might’ve thought it some sort of practical joke.

He was alone. He knew that in seconds.

Collins stood in the center of one of the auxiliary engine rooms- one of the few broad, open spaces in this part of the ship, and usually bustling with red-shirted crewmen- and felt unaccountably afraid. He could think of no reasonable explanation for where the engineering crew had gone. There was no one else aboard. Only the boys in engineering and the boys up on the bridge. No one else.

Collins flipped open his communicator as he walked back through the empty halls, looking around each corner with ever-increasing concern. “Collins here,” he said. “Collins to bridge. Fairholme, respond. Fairholme.”

Nothing.

The walk from Engineering back to the nearest lift was a bad one. The corridor was long, straight, and smooth, with no branching exits, and a floor-to-ceiling window running the length of it, affording a frankly magnificent view of the black.

Collins hated that hallway. He tended to walk it with his head down, eyes downcast, and he actively looked away from that ghastly starfield when he knew he wasn’t being observed. This time, however, his mind was preoccupied with problems. He did not look down. He took the corridor without thinking, his attention on his communicator. “This is Collins to the bridge,” he said, with a little desperation. “Collins to bridge. Is anyone there?”

There _had_ been someone else- he remembered now. Number One had mentioned it. _Dr. Stanley has elected to remain on board, Mr. Collins. I don’t expect he’ll be leaving his cabin._

“Dr. Stanley?” Collins said hesitantly into his communicator. Still nothing.

They had to be on board. There was no other alternative. Collins would have been notified on the bridge if the Faraday had taken flight, and the only other way off the ship was the transporter beams, which were still hopelessly broken. There was no telling what they might do to a man who tried to beam out. Collins was an engineer, and had heard his fair share of horror stories. He knew a faulty beam might scatter a man’s atoms from here to the Neutral Zone, or send his soul one way and his senses another. The men must still be on board.

Something moved outside.

The movement caught Collins’ eye. He forgot himself. He looked.

For a moment, he thought he had imagined it. He saw nothing, nothing at all. Only the silence, and the cold lack of air, and the promise of a swift and brutal brain death before the vacuum ruptured his shattered body. Collins often dreamed of dying in space. When he dared to sleep at all.

Cold glass on his fingertips. Collins realized that he had stepped forward, till he stood right up against the window and the starfield was all he could see. There was nothing out there, surely. No movement. No shadows.

There.

Drifting up from below like a dead fish rising in the water. Floating like so much discarded debris.

Collins was pale and sweating, his eyes wide, his hands trembling where they touched the glass. He could see it now. That thing that had once been human. There it was with its skin bloated and splitting. There it was with its frozen eyes staring, its body unravelling, its guts compressed and exploded beyond their confines.

Collins screamed, and the lights went out.

His feet left the deck and darkness enclosed him. Weightlessness. A phantom noose encircled his neck and choked him, a hanged man with legs kicking in the dark. Before him the stars encompassed his vision. A stiff, frozen hand, still outstretched in terror, seemed to reach for him. Other bloated bodies drifted past, one by one. A whole crew of them. Collins floated among them, nothing between them but glass and a prayer. He screamed and screamed.

The lights came back on.

Collins’ boots hit the deck and his knees gave out on him. He curled in on himself and let out a strangled whimper of panic, half-muffled by his own hand pressed against his mouth. Bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it down. He pushed himself to his feet again and ran, stumbling as he reacquainted himself with ships’ standard gravity. He ran for the lift. He willed it to move faster as it rose. _He spaced them,_ he thought madly, the words shrieking in his head like a panicked alarm bell. _He spaced them. He spaced them. He spaced them._

The bridge was empty, as he knew it would be. Billy Orren had been out there. Fairholme. The others. He dropped to his knees by the door and checked the override scanner. No unauthorized entry. Only the use of a CMO’s emergency medical override.

There was a light blinking on the arm of the command chair. Fitzjames’ chair. _Collins’_ chair, when Fitzjames and Number One were away. The light signified a message, unread. Collins watched as his hand moved slowly, as though from a great way off, and flipped the switch.

_“This is not a note.”_

The viewscreen switched abruptly from a scanned image of the planet below to a prerecorded message. Collins swayed on the spot, his hand gripping the arm of the command chair for support. There was the doctor, sitting stiffly in that same chair, his medical blues in disarray and an empty hypospray dangling limply from his left hand. Around him, Collins’ bridge crew lay slumped at their stations. Unmoving.

 _“To whomever finds our ships,”_ he said. _“We are gone. Dead and gone. Do not attempt to salvage us. Nothing whatever remains.”_

Stanley’s eyes were lifeless, but still they stared. He looked like a dying animal that had long since stopped twitching.

_“These men are dead already. I will put them out the airlock and take the Faraday to Terror, where I will set into motion my plan for the destruction of the Tuunbaq. The crew on Terror will help me do this, as will the men on shore leave. They are dead too. This is a mercy.”_

Collins all but hurled himself into Orren’s chair to check the shuttle bay cameras. The Faraday was gone- he had already taken her then. Collins was alone.

 _“I do not know who you are,”_ said Stanley. He sounded tired. _“Ross, perhaps. Rae. Whoever you are, if it is within your power, please send a message to my daughter at Starfleet Academy. She is in the command track. Tell her there is such a thing as a no-win scenario. Tell her the only winning move is not to play._

_“If you are seeing this message, the Tuunbaq is dead. So are we all. End recording.”_

The message began anew, cycling on a loop. Collins leapt for the door, not fully aware of himself or his body. His lungs burned from hard breathing. He felt an overwhelming desire to curl in on himself until he swallowed himself up like a black hole.

He had to warn them. The men on the ground, at the carnival. Captain Fitzjames was there. _All of them_ were there. It was too late for Terror- if the Faraday was already gone, then there was no chance- but the carnival . . .

“Le Vesconte!” Collins hissed desperately into his communicator. The lift plunged. He prayed the rolling restarts wouldn’t start up again while he was inside it. “Number One! Le Vesconte!” No response.

It was hopeless. Without the Faraday, the only way out was through the transporter beams. There was no surety that a man could pass through them whole. Not now. Not when the dispersal of atoms was such a delicate business. It could leave a man altered beyond recognition.

Collins did not want to go.

He compelled himself to do it anyway.

☆

Crozier grunted in discomfort, his hands clenching and unclenching. Fitzjames, seeing this, adjusted his grip. His knee dug firmly into Crozier’s back to hold him still. Crozier could hear him breathing hard with excitement.

“Now?” Crozier looked at him slyly out of the corner of his eye.

“No, no,” Fitzjames muttered, adjusting his grip again. Crozier grinned and allowed it.

He did not now how long they had carried on like this, or when trying their strength against each other had turned to play. The chase and tussle, the catch and release. Fitzjames was a proud and playful lover and he had not yet managed to hold him down. This was the third time Crozier had allowed him to pin him; arms behind his pack, face pressed to the smooth and numbing ice.

“Now?” Crozier’s eye narrowed as he watched him.

Fitzjames’ face was an absurdity of angles in this light. The artificial glow of the lantern gave him a striking, almost alien appearance. He looked eager. Delighted to be playing this game, and, Crozier suspected, hoping to lose.

“Now,” he said, and Crozier threw him off.

The exhilaration nearly dizzied him. It was like lightning exploding into his heart. Fitzjames was not a flimsy man yet Crozier could break his grip like a dog shaking off rain. He was atop Fitzjames again in a moment and Fitzjames _laughed,_ blushing like a schoolboy and throwing his arms around Crozier’s neck. He smelled like sweat and excitement and Crozier’s essence. Crozier wanted to fuck him so full of seed that it dripped from his open mouth.

“Do you yield, _dinam?”_ he laughed, holding Fitzjames’ wrists fast against the ice. “Do you yield?”

 _“Brute,”_ Fitzjames grinned, struggling hard and twisting beneath Crozier. His knee jabbed him hard in the ribs and Crozier grunted, rolling off him and letting Fitzjames wrestle him to the ground once more.

“Show-off,” Crozier lay contently beneath Fitzjames’ weight, dazed with pleasure. Fitzjames sat up almost primly, with his knees straddling Crozier’s chest, and tossed his hair back out of his face. Crozier skimmed his hands up Fitzjames’ waist and slipped them under the torn gaps in his command golds, relishing the flushed feeling of skin on skin. “I should have put you over my knee in front of all of Starfleet.”

Fitzjames’ eyes glittered. He reached down to palm at Crozier’s prick through his trousers. “Showing off for you,” he murmured, his eyes half-closed. “Wanted you to take me seriously. To sit up and take notice. Wanted to hurt you too, sometimes.”

“It worked,” Crozier groaned, letting his head drop back against the ice. There were times when it was difficult to look at Fitzjames, and this was one such time. When he palmed Crozier’s prick with such shameless appreciation and talked about _Crozier_ noticing _him_. As though Fitzjames weren’t a young star and Crozier simply a pitted moon in his orbit.

“Damn your eyes, if I’d known a rut would keep you this hard,” Fitzjames muttered. He left off Crozier’s prick and leaned down to mouth at his throat and jaw, clumsy kisses mixed with greedy licks like an animal tasting salt. “I envy those Vulcan brides if this is the kind of fucking they can expect.”

“Amazed you can bloody well keep up with me, _h’levreinnye_. You’ve got the energy of a racehorse.”

Fitzjames hummed in amusement. “And the face of one.”

Crozier laughed- god, a dreadful, wheezing thing. Somehow he could not quite find it in himself to be ashamed of it. “If you’re the horse’s face then I’m the arse. I’m about as lacking in personal charms.”

“Then they’re the only thing you lack,” Fitzjames’ hand had found the front of his trousers again. He felt Crozier’s hardness- aching, relentless, brutally painful when not ensheathed in a warm hole- and squeezed him, hard. “God. That’s a man’s instrument, there.”

“Am I wholly a man?” Crozier’s eyes fell closed, lazily enjoying the attention. He rocked his hips up into Fitzjames’ grip. Gentle this time. It came to him more easily now than he had dared hope for. “Man enough for you?”

“More than,” Fitzjames said hoarsely. “Every part of you, man and Romulan. Enough for me.”

Crozier’s eyes opened, narrowed to slits. “I’ll never be either.”

“I’ll not ask you to be,” said Fitzjames. There was a note of desperation in his voice now. “I wanted you as a man who might look at me with the respect I craved to earn. I wanted you as a Romulan who might warm my bed. I know what it is to be two things, Francis, and when I wanted you I wanted you _entire._ ”

Crozier ran his hand through Fitzjames’ hair and brought him down to be kissed. The hungry, breeding urge- the urge to fight, and fuck, and fill- had given way to an urge to simply hold him. Keep him close. Keep him warm. Keep him _quiet,_ which was a trick Crozier doubted he’d ever manage, no matter how thoroughly he kissed that proud mouth.

☆

It was not a difficult job. Dr. Stanley had worked with dead men all his life.

He dragged them, one by one, into the Faraday, where they lay hyposprayed into unconsciousness. Engineering first, then the bridge crew. After that it was just him. He left his message on Terror’s bridge and walked, as though in a dream, back down to Engineering.

He became aware that the Tuunbaq was screaming. Its howls echoed through the security vents. How long had it been howling, and how long had he gone without hearing it? Stanley could not begin to guess. He was cold- so cold now. He felt like he would never be warm again.

The beast could smell the bodies he’d locked in the Faraday. A feast of souls. A trail of fears to follow and feast upon. The Tuunbaq was hungry.

It would follow him anywhere.

Stanley was counting on it.

☆

Goodsir was not the only man to leave the safe confines of the carnival tents. There were others, their dark silhouettes only partially visible by the light of the moons, walking around at a distance and keeping themselves to themselves. Many of them were smoking, and others had simply paired off and were talking, leaning upon each other or admiring the stars. Goodsir, for his part, stood alone where Silna had left him, gazing thoughtfully up at Erebus and Terror. There was something quite soothing about the act of standing outside, with the cool night air upon his face, while the lights of the carnival flickered at his back like an aurora. Goodsir might have stayed there all night had he not heard one of the flaps of the mess tent peel back behind him, and a quiet, surprised, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Goodsir. Didn’t see you there.”

Goodsir closed his eyes and exhaled heavily through his nose. “What brings you out here, Mr. Hickey? To my understanding there’s a party going on.”

“I don’t piss where I eat,” said Hickey lightly, a smile in his voice. “Not that one can rightly help it on a starship.”

Goodsir waited and listened to him piss, feeling strangely reluctant to turn and go back inside. Eventually he did, intending to walk past Hickey into the mess tent, but Hickey had lit a cigarette and now stood by the tent flap, his boots crunching in the snow as he rocked on his heels. “Lovely night, this,” he said. “What brings _you_ out here, Mr. Goodsir?”

The look in his eye made Goodsir uncomfortable, though he could not have said why. Hickey looked ordinary and inelegant. He alone had worn his standard uniform without adornment or embellishment. Ship’s services reds, with black trousers and boots. He squinted and blinked at odd moments. Goodsir wondered if it was the change in light, the movement from the brightly illuminated mess tent to the winter’s night outside.

The corner of Hickey’s mouth twitched. “Fine then. Don’t tell me.” He sighed a deep, smoky exhale and looked up at Terror, where she drifted on her side like a broken toy.

The tent flap behind him was still open, fluttering in the wind. It afforded Goodsir a fine view of the festivities inside. The men were good and drunk already and some of the officers were urging Lieutenant Hodgson up in front of the mess. Goodsir watched as he perched himself on a stool up in front of the company and set his ever-present Vulcan lute upon his knee. Lieutenant Irving wobbled up to stand next to him amid cheers and hollers from the crowd, swaying drunkenly as Hodgson began to play. “ _It’s been a long road . . .”_ He crooned, his voice already slurred. _“Getting from there to here . . . it’s been a long time . . . but my time is finally near . . .”_

Hickey’s smile widened as he saw Goodsir watching. He followed Goodsir’s gaze to the stage, where Irving, holding a glass aloft, had just slopped grog down his front. “Good show, isn’t it,” he said sardonically. “Pity our Captain Crozier isn’t here to see it.”

He turned his back on the tent and walked further out into the snow, his hands neatly clasped behind his back. Goodsir hung back, lingering in the light spilling out from the gap in the tent. From inside he heard Irving start belting out the song with a sudden passion. Something about faith and souls.

“What do you suppose they’re doing out there?” said Hickey, his voice full of casual innocence. He gestured towards the distant ridges of ice, and the high, mountainous hills. “My captain and yours?”

“Mind yourself, Mr. Hickey,” Goodsir said quietly.

“I mind myself more than most,” said Hickey, spilling smoke into the air. He glanced back at him after a moment, squinting. Goodsir realized that he was standing directly in the door, between Hickey and the light of the mess tent, and his eyes couldn’t adjust properly to the strain.

 _“And I will see my dream come alive at last . . .”_ Goodsir heard from somewhere behind him. _“I will touch the sky . . . and they’re not gonna hold me down no more . . . no they’re not gonna change my mind . . .”_

“Do you like Captain Crozier, Mr. Goodsir?”

 _No,_ thought Goodsir, _but he is a good man. Perhaps a better man than most._

“I do,” he lied.

“Think he’ll see us through this, do you?”

“Good night, Mr. Hickey,” said Goodsir, his back already turned. He ducked his head in under the tent flap and at once felt overwhelmed by the noise and heat of dozens of men crowded together in a cramped space. He ducked out again hurriedly.

Inside, Irving was still singing, wobbling around on stage with Hodgson accompanying him on lute. _“I’ve got faith . . . of the heart . . . going where my heart will take me . . .”_

“Funny,” said Hickey, half talking to himself now. His eyes were on the Terror. “He’s not like I thought he’d be at all. A different man. Well,” and here he stood a little straighter, smoothing out his uniform where it sagged at the shoulders. “I suppose we’re all different men now, aren’t we.”

_“I can reach . . . any star . . . I’ve got faith . . . faith of the heart . . .”_

There was something moving out there in the darkness. Goodsir, about to go elsewhere and leave Hickey to his ramblings, hesitated. There had been something there, he was sure of it. Perhaps a pair of late-night revelers, wandering away for a discreet liaison in the snow.

“You’re wrong about him, Mr. Goodsir,” Hickey was saying, apparently oblivious to Goodsir’s growing concern. “He’d leave us to die out here if it meant a halfway-willing mouth around his prick, or haven’t you noticed he’s been looking poorly?”

There it was again. Movement, light. It could not have been more than a few yards ahead of them. A ripple in the air, almost resembling a heat haze, that shuddered and shimmered with golden light. The air hissed as the volatile energy reacted with it and Goodsir took a nervous step backwards, unsure of what he was seeing.

_“I know the wind’s so cold . . . I’ve seen the darkest days . . .”_

It might have been the shine of a transporter beam, if it didn’t flicker in and out of existence so erratically. Transporter beams took seconds. This one lingered, fading in and out as though struggling to solidify itself.

“Mr. Hickey-” said Goodsir, with rising panic.

Hickey shushed him, pointing up towards the Terror. He shielded his eyes from the light with his other hand. “Do you see that?” he hissed, his earlier confidence gone.

_“But now the winds I feel . . . are only winds of change . . . "_

Goodsir’s eyes were transfixed on the light of the transporter beam as it began to shiver and solidify, vaporous atoms slowly giving way to physical form. It happened slowly, with great effort, as though the program had forgotten what a human was and was attempting to assemble one from memory. It made Goodsir’s stomach turn.

The light faded at last, leaving something like a human wobbling unsteadily on his feet in the snow. His eyes were wide, his breath coming in quick, nervous gasps. It was the man who’d come to the medical bay looking for him, Collins. The man in charge of the repairs aboard Erebus.

“Mr. Collins-” said Goodsir, shocked beyond all reason. He stepped forward, reaching out to him.

Collins’ eyes were wild and unseeing. He trembled all over, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from shock. He staggered backwards, burying his face in his hands, and he _laughed._

It was a mad, insane thing. The laugh of a man whose wits had been scattered to the stars.

“Goodsir!” Hickey snapped. “Look!”

_“I’ve been through the fire . . . and I’ve been through the rain . . .”_

Goodsir looked up and saw the Faraday falling, plummeting from Terror like a torpedo. Moving fast- fast enough that it was no longer safe to fly her into the atmosphere. She was burning in reentry. Goodsir’s eyes widened. Fast. Much too fast. And behind it, something streaking through the black like the tail of a comet, something white and vaporous that struck at the Faraday’s engines like lightning to a conductor rod, shattering them and filling the sky with dilithium fire.

_“But I’ll be fine . . .”_

Goodsir moved without thinking, ran without thinking. The shuttle was flying right for them. They had to get out. They had to _get out._

Inside the mess tent people were laughing, talking. Irving was singing, _“I’ve got strength of the soul, and no one’s gonna bend or break me,”_ and Goodsir wanted to laugh and scream and howl like poor mad Collins out in the snow.

☆

It was a good silence. The quiet, easy silence between friends.

They sat together in the mouth of the cave, not talking, with Fitzjames leaning up against the icy wall and Crozier half-sprawled in his lap, drowsily drifting on the very cusp of an exhausted sleep. Fitzjames had done up his coat- it wouldn’t do to be seen with his golds in such a state- but Crozier’s lay draped across him. The lights of the carnival shone several miles in the distance. All was well.

“You ought to have worn it,” Crozier grunted quietly.

Fitzjames’ hand was in his hair, gently stroking. “Hmm?”

“The command dress. I would have liked to see you in it.”

“I’ll bear that in mind for next time.”

In the far distance- a bright flash of violet light, illuminating Crozier’s face with sudden brilliance. Fitzjames looked up sharply, his eyes narrowing. A falling star dropped and he was already on his feet. He could almost smell the crude dilithium igniting in the atmosphere. Not a falling star. The Faraday.

Crozier scrambled to his feet, suddenly alert, but Fitzjames didn’t see him. He was already running, a hopeless struggle on this miserable ice. Someone screamed. He realized it was him.

 _E’lev, e’lev,_ someone was shouting. Crozier’s hand on his arm, Crozier’s arms pinning him, wrestling him into stillness. _James, the dilithium,_ he shouted, but Fitzjames shoved him off and ran, his ears ringing, his heart a thundering stampede. He could see the lights flickering as men ran in every direction. Panicking. Trying to get out.

The ship was coming to pieces in the atmosphere, great chunks of flaming metal sloughing off. Something was clambering around the outside of it, some great, hulking thing, half beast and half vapor. Crozier was running now too. Fitzjames saw him, blind with panic, his eyes reflecting the virulent, purple flames as the Faraday came crashing to the surface.

It hit the center of the mess tent and the force of the impact made the ground shake.

The shock wave slammed Fitzjames onto his back even several miles out, the impact knocking all the breath out of him. Crozier dragged himself to his feet first, helping him up. They watched in horror as the explosion plumed upwards, a vast cloud of violet-tinged dilithium smoke. The cloud continued to rise, twisting, yawning into the unnatural form of a beast with jaws opened wide. The Tuunbaq screamed, and Fitzjames’ ears began to bleed.

Erebus and Terror looked on, quiet and empty above them. No shuttle. No crew.

Only the silent planet, and the frigid arctic wind, which even now was beginning to taste of dilithium.


	5. The Mutineer Camp

_In a part of space where there are few rules, it's more important than ever that we hold fast to our own. In a region where shifting allegiances are commonplace, we have to have something stable to rely on._

_\- Captain Janeway_

☆

Odd to think that he would never see Andoria again. His blood would never grace the Wall of Heroes there, nor would the smoke from his pyre tarnish the ice with ash. Still, it was a death by _ushaan-_ a duel of honor. Death was an adventure, and there were far worse ways for Thomas Blanky to die.

He had been walking now for three days, and though the arctic chill felt like a summer breeze on his Andorian skin, his new leg was not so resilient. It ached in the cold. The metal creaked, and sharp shocks of pain like needles in his nerves threatened to deaden his whole left side. Dilithium rot had begun to set in. The raw, puckered patch of skin where his leg was affixed to him was just beginning to crust over with off-white mineral deposits. Like salt building on the hull of a ship.

Blanky was one of the lucky ones. He only saw the faintest threads of violet in the crystals.

The carnival killed some. The shock wave from the impact would kill all of them if they weren’t rescued, and they wouldn’t be. Blanky knew that already. Even if the impossible had happened and Fairholme’s message to Captain Ross had been received, Blanky would be a dead man long before Ross snapped out of warp. Better to lead the Tuunbaq far from camp. Better to let it follow him for days.

Better to give Frank a chance.

He stopped on the evening of the third day and swayed dizzily, exhausted. He sat down very suddenly. The moons wavered in the mist. The vast expanse of an alien world stretched out in every direction around him. It was still and silent. There were no groans of the sick or dying, no whispering mutineers. No half-Romulan heartbeat.

Blanky could hear nothing. He had never heard nothing before.

His fingers probed the raw place where leg met flesh. Thick, dark blue blood welled up between the cracks in the crystals. Blanky grit his teeth and set about disengaging the mechanism. The leg disconnected with a pneumatic hiss. It was painless. A miracle of medical technology. He tossed it aside and rested the bleeding stump in the snow. The cold shocked him, sang though him like a reminder of bygone winters back home.

This would be his last winter.

Not a bad way to go.

☆

Crozier was never without the obligations of command, but he did his share of the labor, same as the men. At night he lived among the sick, sitting by their bedsides and offering some small, hollow comfort. He listened to them when they rambled. It was the best he could do. Terror Camp had become a plague pit.

“Tell me what the marks mean,” said Fitzjames, late one night when they were alone. His voice was very weak.

Crozier did not have the energy to smile, but he squeezed Fitzjames’ hand in both of his own. “They are the marks of grief.”

It was warm in their Starfleet-issue survival tents, warm enough for Crozier to roll up the sleeves of his golds. He let Fitzjames’ fingertips touch the dark streaks along his arms, careful patterns painted in a thick, ashy substance.

“For Thomas,” said Crozier. “And the men.”

Fitzjames let his hand drop. “They’re beautiful.”

“They are temporary,” Crozier warmed a damp cloth between his hands before touching it to Fitzjames’ forehead. “It is customary among Romulans. When the paint fades, so too does the period of mourning.”

He did not tell Fitzjames that to ink them in was an act of sacrilege. A willful, ugly manifestation of grief. He did not tell him that he intended to do it, if Ross brought them home.

Ross would never bring them home. He knew that now.

Crozier’s fingertips brushed the hair at Fitzjames’ temples. He felt the rise and fall of Fitzjames’ chest grow stronger at the touch, and soon the ache in Crozier’s chest began to ease somewhat.

The Vulcans called it _t’hy’la._ Companion, lover, and brother. One breath, breathed by two.

There was no such word in the Romulan tongue.

Some cruel trick of biology had left Crozier untouched by dilithium rot while the other men suffered. He was malnourished, and pale with hunger, but the false crystals did not break out on his skin or liquify his scar tissue. Fitzjames had not been spared that indignity.

His skin had split and crystalized, mostly upon the arms and upper chest, and the crystals grew thickest where his body had been burned by phaser fire. He might have been made of ice, and it hurt him to breathe. Fitzjames’ right eye had solidified, entirely immobile, and had grown thickly veined with violet. The lid was frozen wide, unable to close over the rough chunk of uncured crystal. The eye would have to be removed. The thick, pulsing violet at the heart of it showed that the nerves had spread. It would be agony.

It was said that _t’hy’la_ could, on occasion, carry the pain of the other. Vulcans were unlike Romulans in that regard. They shared their minds, the very vibrations of their thoughts, with those they loved. Crozier envied them their gift. If he might lay Fitzjames upon the surgeon’s table, yet bear the pain of the knife himself . . .

No. Fitzjames could stand, could even walk, and some tenuous fiber of strength yet remained at the heart of his being, but it did not matter in the least. Terror Camp was home to no surgeon. The medical personnel had been wiped out in the impact. All but one, and he had been stunned and dragged off when the mutineers had amputated themselves from the rest of the redshirts and formed their own miserable passel of survivors. It was as hopeless for them as it was for Crozier’s meager crew. Terror’s scanners had shown a planetwide wasteland of ice. It was enough to drive a man mad. Or mutinous. There had been a sickening few days, not long after Irving had turned up dead, when the morning watch could see the mutineers out there. The occasional glimpse of scarlet through the fog. Not anymore. That wretch Hickey had alerted them to the way their uniforms were visible from miles off.

Terror Camp was dwindling now. With any luck, the mutineers were dwindling too.

Fitzjames twitched in his sleep. His teeth ground together. Crozier leaned down to kiss the cold crystal of his cheek and closed his eyes, listened to the throbbing of Fitzjames’ all-too-human heart. He thought of Blanky, and the thought made nausea overwhelm him. His hand clutched at Fitzjames’ stained sheets. So many men gone, and now Blanky too. How could he go on after such a loss?

Fitzjames would live. He would not die out here, in the farthest reaches of space. He would die on the planet that bore him.

Crozier’s hands unclenched. He stood very stiffly, and touched his fingertips to Fitzjames’ wrist. He wondered what a Vulcan would feel. Perhaps Fitzjames’ sickness would creep along his thoughts and poison his brain.

Fitzjames was not the only man sick.

Crozier turned his back with great reluctance, and left his heart in the tent with Fitzjames as he shuffled out onto the ice. The artificial brilliance of floodlights made Terror Camp almost scaldingly bright, but the men were about their duties and had grown accustomed to it. They kept watch, repaired damaged tents. The remaining engineers were still clustered around the fire pit where Crozier had left them, attempting to restore full power to their one and only portable food replicator. It was not equipped to feed a crew on this scale, and it was nearly nonfunctional, just as the shipboard machines had been. The black sludge it produced made the men sick with headaches and intestinal complaints. The camp reeked of blood and excrement.

Terror and Erebus hung silently above, listing like ships sinking in the sky. Empty metal hulls. The Faraday was long gone, and whatever remained of her was in the hands of the mutineers now. The shock wave from the crash had caused the dilithium on board the shuttle to react poorly with the atmosphere, infecting the ice in a ten-mile radius around the point of impact.

Crozier had led his crew on a long, long walk to lose sight of that pollution. It didn’t matter. The infection had already taken hold.

Their communicators worked with the ship’s receptors, but not each other. They were useless. There was no one on board the ships to hear them. Crozier kept his, though it was little more than a cold bit of metal that dug into his leg when he walked. He couldn’t bring himself to abandon it. It was like throwing away a sliver of hope, and Crozier didn’t have many slivers.

Someone had left J’opson’s tent unlaced, and the flap whipped open in the wind. Crozier pulled it back, shuffled inside, and laced it again. Despite the momentary exposure the interior was warm with fevered heat. McDonald’s sickbay had never smelled like that. He’d kept it clean.

Crozier thought of McDonald’s skull, shattered into atoms by the collision. One of many bodies that would never be found.

He put the thought from his mind and sat by J’opson’s bedside. He was a frail and brittle thing now, wasting away. His thin wrists had crystalized. Crozier could see his bones beneath the opaque surface. The disease progressed quickly in Vulcans, and though J’opson had never once raised his voice in complaint, Crozier knew the cold was a bitter grievance. Vulcans felt the cold acutely, even in warm climes. His suffering was greater than most, and Crozier felt a strong desire to ease it however he could.

He touched his hand to J’opson’s shoulder, careful to avoid the skin. J’opson stirred. “Sir,” he croaked. He began to sit up.

“Belay that,” said Crozier gently, laying him back down. “I am only here to see that you’ve been sleeping.”

“Well enough, sir,” said J’opson, which meant that he had not. He did not sleep these days, as Crozier well knew, but lay in a vague and restless trance. When he spoke his words were emotional and unclear. He did not like anyone to hear him speak illogically. He rarely had visitors.

Crozier was the exception. “You need your rest, _arrhe,”_ he said, scooting his chair closer to J’opson’s bedside. “You’re of no use to anyone without it. That’s logic, hmm?” He smiled. “Now then. I’m sure I’ve some peace of mind tucked away somewhere. Have at it, and sleep.”

J’opson’s breathing was slow and labored. He looked pained, and wistful. “Sir, you don’t have to do that.”

“J’opson,” said Crozier, a little sternly. “You have offered me this particular service many times before. I will offer it to you now. _Sleep._ That’s an order.”

He sat patiently at J’opson’s side as J’opson slowly sat up, just enough to free his arms and remove one of his gloves. His knuckles were stiff with cold, but had yet to crystalize. J’opson grit his teeth against the pain and lifted his arm, touching his bare fingertips to Crozier’s ridged temple.

Crozier felt his mind fill with something warm and seeking, almost frantic. He felt it run its fingertips along the spines of his mind’s library, gently, as though checking that all was in order. _None of that,_ he thought, _no tidying up. You’re here for your own sake, not mine._

He closed his eyes and thought of Colleen Foley’s sehlat, and wide, quiet pastures on faraway worlds. He opened them again only when J’opson’s hand had dropped loosely atop his coverlet, and he saw that J’opson’s eyes had fallen closed as well. His breath came slow and even. He was asleep.

Crozier sat by J’opson’s bedside a few minutes more. Then he stood and left the tent, lacing it carefully shut behind him.

☆

“They said I was the best walker in Starfleet,” said Fitzjames, and it was almost true. He walked regularly now, as often as he could bear it, and each time farther and farther from the camp. Crozier walked with him, serving as his right eye and steadying him where necessary, with Hartnell and a boy, Magnus, walking behind. All were armed with phaser rifles, all expected to use them. Perhaps the creature was not dead. Perhaps the mutineers lay hidden in the fog.

The cold stung Fitzjames’ skin like needles driven into his pores. He stopped for a moment, just to catch his breath, and felt Crozier’s hand on his arm. Fitzjames had gone completely blind in one eye and could not see Crozier without turning his head. When he did he saw a sober and exhausted man. Even now, days later, Crozier should have been hale and healthy, flushed with the victory of a satisfying Pon Farr. There was none of that in his face now. Only a kind of desperately sad affection when he looked at Fitzjames that made his stomach sink, wishing he had a better face to show him than one forever mangled by dilithium rot.

Fitzjames looked away grimly. “How far now?”

“Well beyond the perimeter.”

“I want to circle it. Twice more, if I am able.”

“-’s go farther out.”

Fitzjames turned his head to get a fix on the voice. It was Magnus, walking by Hartnell’s shoulder. He pointed into the fog. “My patrol comes this way every night,” he muttered, in a voice muted and dim with the same sluggish exhaustion that afflicted the rest of the men. “It’s safe. More ’n safe, an’ the walk’s a bit smoother, more level, sir.”

Some wretched reminder of Fitzjames’ lost vanity twinged in his belly, but his skin was so numb with pain that he allowed the impertinence of the comment to pass. Crozier’s hand tightened on Fitzjames’ arm. Fitzjames shook his head slightly, and Crozier’s grip eased. “Farther out, then,” he said, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the wind. His breath felt like razors in his throat. “The walk will do me good.”

They had not gone far out at all- scarcely far enough to lose the lights of Terror camp- when Fitzjames heard a shifting of the shale. Footsteps, fast and clumsy. A ship’s whistle.

Crozier stopped. Squeezed Fitzjames’ arm to halt him, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“Hartnell,” he said, and Hartnell vaporized.

It was a shocking, instantaneous thing. A flash of red light, as though the moon had gone bloody, and Hartnell’s atoms scattered like a swarm of flies. The atmosphere popped sharply as it filled the sudden vacuum and Fitzjames drew his own rifle, looking wildly in every direction for the source of the shot. _“Down!”_ he shouted, pushing Crozier to his knees as a phaser bolt flashed over his head like lightning. Magnus had the nose of his phaser pressed to the back of Fitzjames’ skull before Crozier could stand.

“Lower your weapon, sir,” he said shakily. “I’m- we’re taking you to the other camp.”

☆

The mutineer camp was cold and dark. No floodlights, no polymer tents whipping in the wind. Crozier saw the situation from a distance and had it confirmed as he drew closer; they had salvaged no equipment, not even a broken replicator. All they had they’d scavenged from the cooling remains of Fitzjames’ carnival- knives, discarded phasers, scraps of cloth and sheet metal. Their makeshift tents provided hardly any cover. A kingdom of scraps and refuse.

The cold made him feel stiff and elderly. Armitage- one of the men who’d gone out to fetch him- had stripped him and Fitzjames of their coats, and they shivered in their golds and breeches. Crozier’s hands were tied so tight that they’d turned a blotchy green, and Pilkington had struck him hard in the nose, making it bleed. The wind dirtied his skin with a thin layer of semi-translucent dust. _All that remains of Tom Hartnell,_ he thought, and the thought made some ugly, Romulan thing claw at his ribcage and demand to be set loose.

“Move, sir,” said Armitage. The nose of his phaser thumped Crozier hard in the back. Still _sir_ then. Good.

Fitzjames’ steps were slow and labored, but their captors kept them walking at a pace. The sound of his breathing made Crozier’s skin prickle with the urge to stop them, to raise his voice and give the order for rest. For a moment, he wondered if Armitage might even do it. He would remember Crozier’s authority. Crozier could _make_ him remember.

He swallowed the urge and walked on.

The mutineers in the camp had long since seen their approach. A handful of them lurched out, sick and reeking of contamination. Several of them still wore ripped and faded carnival costumes over their reds, perhaps to camouflage themselves without losing the insulation of their uniforms.

“Here they are,” said Pilkington hoarsely. He shoved Fitzjames forward, causing him to stumble. Fitzjames hissed in pain, but did not fall. “Both of ‘em.”

One of the mutineers stepped forward, armed with a phaser rifle. He removed the cloth covering around his face- Tozer, then- and set the phaser to kill so that Crozier could see it. “Take him to the doctor,” he said. “Let him get fixed up. Our captain will see Mr. Fitzjames now.”

Fitzjames’ good eye narrowed, but he walked forward without prompting. Crozier watched him disappear among the scrap tents, flanked by two men on either side- a sick man, on his last legs, and still they placed their best men around him. Crozier felt a savage sort of pleasure at the thought.

“Go on, sir,” Armitage muttered, again nudging Crozier along with the nose of his phaser. He sounded uncertain. “Go on. To the doctor’s tent with you.”

They marched Crozier through the center of camp to get there, affording him a clear view of the clumsy tents, the broken electronics, the failed attempts to keep fires burning in a high wind. The whole camp reeked of sickness and the acrid stench of burning rubber. Crystal deposits seemed to be forming on the ground itself, even crawling up the tentpoles, and Crozier soon saw why.

They had taken the Faraday, the source of the contamination. It was little more than a twisted heap of metal now, barely recognizable as a ship, but they had taken her. They had dragged her a long, long way and apparently were either trying to fix her or strip her for parts; Crozier could see the holes ripped in her panelling where her engine had been exposed to the arctic air. Beneath the stench of dilithium there was the fading smell of burned meat. If any part of Dr. Stanley had not been reduced to atoms, it had long since been devoured.

There were guards posted outside the medical tent. One of them stepped aside, pulled back a scrap of polymer to allow Crozier through. It was cold inside, and dark, more of a prison cell than a med bay. Clear plastic sheeting had been laid across the shale, and hung at intervals between two filthy attempts at cots. Goodsir’s silhouette looked warped through them, and when he rose and pulled a curtain back to see who’d entered, Crozier saw that his ankle had been chained to a broken lump of metal slag.

Armitage pushed Crozier forward. His boots scraped on the ground. “Look him over.”

Silence, then, as the flap fell back into place. Crozier slumped himself onto a capsule trunk, grimly running his tongue along his teeth. Blood had dripped into his mouth. His mind was preoccupied with the layout of the camp- there could not be many men, and few of them armed- and he bitterly wished he had not been separated from Fitzjames.

“Let me have a look at your face,” said Goodsir, very quietly.

Crozier looked at him, nodded a rough assent. Goodsir approached him, dragging his leg with every step, and knelt beside him. He unslung his tricorder from his shoulders. “They let you keep your tricorder?” said Crozier, watching Goodsir pass it wearily back and forth across his vitals.

Goodsir’s uniform was stained purple with dried blood. He sighed, stood up. “It is useless to them,” he said. He picked up a cloth from one of the flimsy cots and rubbed a handful of snow into it. “It doesn’t help Hickey communicate with man or beast. It only helps me heal,” A breathy laugh. “There has not been much call for that.”

Crozier’s eyes followed Goodsir’s hands. Watched him warm the damp cloth between his hands and apply it to Crozier’s bleeding face. He tilted his chin up. “How many men in the camp?” he whispered.

Goodsir did not reply for a long moment. Then came the answering, “Nine.”

“Is that all?”

“Two men died of the rot yesterday.”

“What about phasers? Communicators?”

Goodsir set his tricorder aside and picked up his medical kit. He looked tired. “Tozer. Armitage, Pilkington. No coms, as far as I know.”

“Hickey?”

“Hickey carries a knife.”

Crozier nodded. He touched his nose, felt for blood. There was none. He wiped his hand on his trousers anyway. “What about Gibson?” he said slowly, considering. Gibson was never far from Hickey. Hickey would surely have armed him.

Goodsir’s hands stilled on the clasp of his kit. “We have no replicators here.”

Crozier watched him search through the bag, not talking. He saw the long row of loaded hyposprays gleaming in their aluminum case. “Dr. Goodsir,” he said quietly.

“No,” said Goodsir. “No.”

He set the case aside and gestured for Crozier to lift his head. Crozier did, turning it to let Goodsir press the head of the hypospray to the pulse point in the side of his neck. There was a hiss, and a dull, bruising pain like being punched, and Goodsir set the empty hypospray aside. “If ever I was a doctor, I am one no longer,” he murmured. He stood and gazed around him, looking like an old man who had wandered off without knowing where he was.

Crozier rubbed his neck. The pain from the injection was already fading. Outside he could hear the wind whistling, the groans of the tents creaking in the onslaught. The men weren’t talking. All was as quiet as death.

“Do you know, I . . .” Goodsir said faintly. “I . . . I joined Starfleet that I might see the farthest reaches of creation, yet now that we have sailed so far beyond the reach of any god, I . . .” Gravel crunched outside. Goodsir looked away, rubbing his palms on his stained blues as though hoping to salvage them. “Captain,” he murmured. “If you are still here when they make a meal of me . . .”

“Don’t,” said Crozier sharply. “Not a word of it.”

“If you are here,” Goodsir repeated. His gentleness brooked no argument. It had always been that way with him. “On your honor, sir, do not accept. If he insists-”

“It won’t come to that,” said Crozier, a little desperation in his voice.

The shadows moved between the tent and the ice. Someone was coming in. “If he insists,” Goodsir whispers, “eat only of my feet. The soles if possible. The toughest part. Do you understand?”

“Sir?’ said a hesitant voice- Magnus. He pulled the tent flap aside and peered in, phaser rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. His uniform sleeve was a striking smear of red under the cuff of his coat. “I mean- Crozier. Sir. You.”

“Speak, Magnus,” said Crozier. He looked up at him and Magnus stepped back.

“Our captain, s-” said Magnus. He swallowed, then shook his head almost violently. “H-he’ll speak with you now.”

Crystals had begun to pierce the skin around his collarbone, forcing their way up and out through the thin tissue. It gave him the look of a collared dog, or the priest of some far-distant moon colony. Crozier did not fight with him, or argue. He heaved himself up with a great effort, and would have followed Magnus right away, had Goodsir not gripped his arm.

“His eyes are not like ours,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “He cannot see in the changing light.”

“Come on, then,” said Magnus uncertainly. His voice was hoarse. It would grow hoarser when the crystals spread to his throat. Crozier let himself be marched out, and looked back before the tent flap fell into place. He saw Goodsir sitting slumped on his vacated capsule trunk, looking down at his medical kit, and the long line of loaded hyposprays.

Outside Crozier looked left and right to every hovel, wondering which held Fitzjames, which Tozer, which Mr. Diggle. A gleam of gold shocked him and he turned his head, only to see Lieutenant Hodgeson shivering on an upturned bucket, staring senselessly down at a dead communicator.

Hickey’s dwelling was the nearest approximation of a survival tent that Crozier had yet seen; strips of sheet metal, poles, and cords bearing a heavy load of scrap polymer and reams of fabric against the elements. It was a patchwork doll of a dwelling, pulled together from a myriad of different carnival tents. Crozier saw strips of black where the uniforms of the dead had been sewn into flaps.

The darkness inside was broken only the steady blinking of a soon-to-expire emergency lantern. The red glow faded in and out, in and out, illuminating Hickey’s pale face where he sat cross-legged at the far end of the tent. He gestured for Crozier to sit down.

Crozier did not move. “You could send Captain Fitzjames back, you know,” he said. “No point in keeping both of us.”

“You are not the man I knew,” said Hickey, smiling. He gestured again, and this time, Crozier sat.

Hickey’s uniform- red, for ship’s services- had been defaced. The sleeves had been torn roughly off, revealing Hickey’s pale arms, bristling with goosebumps in the cold. He had tied the bloodstained remains of a command uniform around his waist like a golden sash. Crozier knew from the insignia still gleaming there that it was Irving’s.

Hickey sat for a long moment and merely looked at him with a sly gaze. The light faded in and out, in and out. Crozier watched Hickey’s pupils change.

“When you had the men strip me bare and strap me to the agony booth I thought my throat would tear from screaming,” Hickey said. His smile didn’t waver. “That was before the ion storm of course. I was working in Engineering, keeping my head down. Hoping that your dear Mr. Blanky wouldn’t have a mind to grease Terror’s wheels with my blood. She was a ship with teeth, we used to say. There’s a reason why they called her Terror.”

The way he said _Terror_ made his lip curl, showed his teeth. He looked Crozier up and down with something not quite like hatred. Amused contempt.

Crozier knew that look well.

“When I knew you, you wore Romulan armor,” Hickey’s pupils dilated sharply at that. “Your teeth weren’t blunted by the world. When the ion storm came, I was in the transporter room. You ordered me there. I still don’t know the particulars of what happened.”

He looked down at his hands, cracked and dry with the cold. His nails were black with blood and engine grease.

“Same thing as happened to Mr. Collins, I should think. Or something very like,” said Hickey, very quietly. “Felt like being flayed down to my atoms. Then I was here. I can only assume that some other Cornelius Hickey- your Hickey, if you like- is there. In the belly of the beast.”

He shrugged. A small, mouse-like twitch of the shoulders.

“As for me, no one knew the difference. No one even noticed I’d grown a beard. And you,” now he looked Crozier in the eyes with that same look of amusement that had followed Crozier all his life. “All the same but different. No Empire, no Terra. No agony booth,” Hickey rubbed his hands together. Crozier heard the faint _scritch scritch_ of dry skin. “Alone in another world, surrounded by men who indulged their morals over their practicals. Until I came along and convinced them otherwise.”

“I forgive them for that,” Crozier heard himself say. His voice was as brittle as cracked screen. “I forgive all of them but you.”

Hickey smiled. His eyes were very dark, and the glimmer of life within them had almost gone out. A star collapsing inward on itself, drawing in everything around it. Succumbing to the intolerable pressure of its own gravitational pull.

“I’m the cuckoo in the nest,” he said mildly.

“Just so.”

“Can you ever forgive yourself for not spotting me?”

“I don’t know,” said Crozier. “I don’t know and I won’t know, not until it’s all over.”

“You really are a different man,” said Hickey, without looking away. His stillness, and his lack of apparent fear in the face of the mindless cruelty of the universe, made him seem like a very alien thing indeed. “You let shame drive you. You hold yourself to the standard of a man you are not. I expected better of you,” This last is said with a lilt and a sigh; a sorrowful, almost childlike thing. As though the regret were earnest. “Of all of you. In all this wretched, soft place, you are the nearest thing I have to an equal.”

“You must be a surpassingly lonely man, Mr. Hickey.”

“I am an alien,” said Hickey. “I am, perhaps, the only truly alien thing in this world.”

He stood slowly, languidly, until the crown of his head brushed the stunted roof of his tent. He stretched his arms out in front of him, then back down. “Do you know what the men are saying? They say this creature that hunts us is a savage thing unknown to science. What you men call savage, Mr. Crozier, I call brother. I think I love this creature,” Hickey smiled. “I see myself in it.”

“We should not have come this way,” Crozier’s eyes were fixed on Hickey’s face. “We should not have gone out this far.”

“Is that not the underlying principal of your Starfleet?” said Hickey. “To boldly go?”

Crozier’s gaze fell to the ice at Hickey’s feet, and the dirty, half-melting puddles of snow. His eye caught on the shine of white thread, and the initials _JF_ stitched into Hickey’s boots.

He felt, for a moment, that his soul must leap out of himself and strangle Hickey where he stood. His body, treacherous and all too human, remained where he sat, and soon enough the roaring wind that filled his head with static gave way to a hollow silence.

Hickey looked down at him. He was a man of meagre stature, yet now, he looked down. “Mr. Des Voeux?” He said, raising his voice a little.

“What have you done with him?” said Crozier. He did not recognize his voice as his own.

Hickey raised his eyebrows. His eyes widened, bulging comically, and his lips parted with a soft click. “Done? Oh, I- oh, don’t worry yourself, Mr. Crozier, by god,” He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb, shaking his head with the air of a long-suffering schoolmaster. “I haven’t _done_ anything to him. Mr. Fitzjames will be joining us for dinner soon enough.”

He dared not leap at him. He _wanted_ to. Crozier felt a cold, creeping anger like a drip of lead in his veins, making him feel sick and heavy. Des Voeux’s shadow fell upon him and Hickey looked up, smiling. “Mr. Des Voeux,” he said, nodding pointedly at Crozier. “Please escort our honored guest out.”

Again, the nose of of a phaser, cold and hard in Crozier’s back, and again the long walk through the camp, but this time he felt dazed. The guards were many here at the far end of camp, where Crozier was to be kept; it did not matter. The fog was thick, and they were far, far from the others by now. With luck, Crozier might be able to walk out. Fitzjames was lucky if he could walk five steps.

It was sparse in the prison tent, and cold. The shadows of the guards outside flickered in the gap between the tent and the ice. He had been given a cot and a dirty sonic basin that emitted a ceaseless buzzing, but that was the extent of Hickey’s hospitality.

Fitzjames was there, waiting for him. His hands gripped the edge of the cot as he stood to face Crozier on his feet. “There you are,” he said quietly. Then, quieter. “I would have rushed them, but my legs . . .”

He swayed on the spot. Crozier stepped forward quickly to steady him. Fitzjames’ skin felt cold, almost dead. Crozier could barely feel his pulse. “Steady,” he muttered. “Steady, lad.”

Fitzjames sat down heavily on the cot again. Crozier sat beside him. They dared not speak their minds, not with the guards so close at hand, but Crozier hesitantly touched his hand to Fitzjames’ shoulder and hoped he was understood. Fitzjames sagged against him, grateful for the touch, and Crozier’s fingertips followed the growth of crystals up to the side of Fitzjames’ face, which he cupped in his palm. His frozen eye was still intact. For one wild moment, as Fitzjames had been led away, Crozier had feared Hickey would rip it out.

“How long will they keep us here?” Fitzjames whispered.

Crozier’s mouth had gone dry.

“I don’t know.”

☆

“Something is different tonight,” said Fitzjames.

A voice from the darkness beside him, whispering. “How can you tell?”

“I feel it.”

Every night, rough hands tore the tent flap aside. Every night, Tozer and Des Voeux dragged Fitzjames from sleep, hauling him out to the dinner table and propping him up like a doll at a child’s tea party. Crozier, his hands lashed- they were afraid of him, even now- would be seated beside him, and Hickey would smile a slow and syrupy smile and say no, Mr. Tozer, what are you doing. Husband and wife must never be seated together. So they would be seated, gazing at their plates and each other’s hollow faces across the table, while Hickey muttered and rubbed his wrists and urged them to eat the unholy dinners provided to them. They never did.

This had gone on for five days.

“How far we are now,” Fitzjames murmured. “From Earth. From all of it. How quickly we have returned to our baser roots.”

Crozier’s hand in the darkness, touching his wrist. It did not tremble despite the cold.

“Our baser roots can be overcome,” he whispered. “I know that better than most.”

He could hear men running. No shouts or voices, as though something had stolen the breath from the lungs of the mutineers. Only the sound of movement, and finally Tozer’s voice, rising high and croaky above the rest. “He was a coward. He knew. He knew.”

The tent flap was flung open wide, admitting Des Voeux with rifle in hand. Time for dinner.

Silence outside but for the crunching of boots on snow. The moons hung in silent reflection- they looked, to Fitzjames, like the doll-like faces of children looking down at their collection of toy soldiers. The corpses of Erebus and Terror drifted among the stars, emptied of all life. The universe might well have been emptied of all life, for all Fitzjames knew.

The table was set. Sheet metal propped up on canisters. Pale-faced men huddled around it with their heads down, their eyes staring. All dressed in the tattered remains of their costumes. Some distance away Lieutenant Hodgeson still sat hunched on his stool. He could not meet Fitzjames’ eye.

Hickey stood at the head of the table with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out over his crew. He’d ordered another table set up behind him, this one squat and flat and low to the ground, and a pale figure had been heaped upon it like discarded fat at the butcher’s block.

Crozier made a low, pained noise.

“You’ll come and eat with us, won’t you, Mr. Crozier? Mr. Fitzjames?” said Hickey innocently gesturing behind him. “Mr. Goodsir was kind enough to prepare the meal for us today. We’ve got a long day ahead of us. It wouldn’t do to waste his gift.”

 _Eat only of his feet,_ Crozier had said dully, into the dark. _That’s what he told me. The soles. The toughest part._

Fitzjames felt bile rise in the back of his throat. The table was set and the men had been served. They waited now, with hollow eyes and empty bellies, for their former captains to serve themselves.

Crozier turned away, walked past Hickey to the cold, dead thing that had once been a man. Fitzjames felt very aware of his own pulse, his own breath. He saw Crozier’s hand white-knuckle the knife Hickey had left there and he lurched forward, caught Crozier’s hand in his own. “Let me,” he whispered. “Let me.”

To defile the dead was unthinkable among Romulans. This, at least, Fitzjames could do.

He did not look when he did it. He closed his remaining eye, let the unseeing one gaze emptily down as he cut from the heel, as instructed. The knife had no bite. It was a difficult cut.

It didn’t feel like flesh when he held it. Not human, nor even animal. It felt like a scrap of rubber peeled from a broken replicator, something utterly lifeless. Yet it was meat, and skin. It smelled of death.

Crozier was the first to swallow his piece. He chewed for a long, long time before it went down.

“A toast,” said Hickey, raising an empty cup in mock celebration, “to Mr. Goodsir, the founder of the feast.”

Fitzjames stared at the whiteout fog surrounding them and swallowed. He felt the flesh slip down his throat, slow enough to choke him, before settling in his belly like a stone. He didn’t feel it when Magnus’ phaser directed him to his seat; he walked as though in a dream, sitting down opposite Crozier and staring down at a grease spot on the sheet metal. Stared until his vision swam, until he was no longer able to determine if his good eye was open or closed. He felt Crozier tap the toe of his boot against Fitzjames’ ankle, as if to say, _hold fast_. Fitzjames felt it only dimly. His feet were numb and beginning to vein with violet. He would soon lose them to the cold.

“Usually,” said Hickey, “the founder of the feast is the man who stands at the head of the table, and does the carving. But I’m afraid our Harry is not available to do the carving himself this time. Still, no doubt he can still serve us.”

“You’ve wasted him,” Crozier croaked. Fitzjames looked up at him. He was looked at Hickey with a cold, dark look, like a man contemplating the airlock. “This man of all men.”

“He knew what awaited him when dawn broke,” said Hickey. Then he smiled, spread his arms wide. “Well then. Go on. Eat quickly, lads, and well. Tonight we bring this,” he nodded at the broken remains of the Faraday, “back to the impact point, and I show you what Goodsir was afraid of.”

☆

It was a long walk back. Thick crystal spines had begun to tear Fitzjames’ clothes, particularly around the joints; it gave him the appearance of some bizarre deep sea creature. His bones felt like they would shatter. Fitzjames creaked with every step.

Despite this, he felt an odd detachment from the pain. He walked as though in a dream. The strap across his chest dug into his skin, made him feel heavy with blood and bruises. The shuttle was little more than a heap of metal, and the twisted edges dug into the shale, made it near impossible to move. It left deep furrows in the ground wherever they dragged it. It stank of dilithium and shuttle grease.

Hickey, from his position atop the shuttle, looked proudly down on all. The men had been strapped up with chains and harnesses like ancient sled dogs, too dull from hunger to recognize that they were prisoners as much as their captains. Crozier pulled from the far left, and Fitzjames from the far right. The symmetry of it pleased Hickey, as well as their separation. Fitzjames could not see him, half blind as he was, but he could hear him. The sound of his boots- _Fitzjames’_ boots- on loose metal as he paced the Faraday’s hull. His voice as he muttered obscenities.

The place where the shockwave had gone out was a black blight on the landscape. Crystals, dilithium-like in nature but utterly useless for the propulsion of ships, had begun to swell and buckle the earth like frost heaves. A thick haze hung in the air.

They were deep, deep in the impact zone now. Every now and then Fitzjames would turn his head, struggling for a glimpse of his captor. Even so close at hand, he couldn’t make out the finer details of Hickey’s face. Fitzjames watched him prime a phaser once or twice and fire it into the air, covering his eyes with his hand so he would not see the red lightning. “Buggered thing. Damn beautiful teeth-and-claws,” he said, drawing his hand slowly down his face. To Fitzjames’ unfocused gaze, his eyes were two gaping wounds. “Think it’s gone rotten? Think that thing’s all dilithium now? We’ll see.”

They walked, and walked, and walked. The crystal deposits had cracked through the ground in places, sending up tall, spindly spires. The ice cut into the soles of Fitzjames’ feet until they bled. He thought of Goodsir’s wretched body and a strangled laugh croaked out of him before he collapsed.

Crozier lunged to catch him but his chain snapped taut. “Leave him!” cried Hickey, raising his voice with a madman’s jovial air. “Leave him! We’ll not go farther. Let the creature find us here.”

Fitzjames braced himself with his hands and pushed himself up. A thin string of his own spit had adhered to the ice. He got his legs under him and stood, unwilling to die on his belly. He saw Crozier staring at him with his mouth set in a thin line. Magnus, who had been pulling closer to Fitzjames, bent double and vomited.

Something shrieked in the distance.

“Pilkington! Your phaser! Fire it!” cried Hickey. Again his phaser flashed, once, twice, and lit up the sky with red lightning.

“He’s sick, sir!” said Pilkington, lurching towards Magnus. His skin was greenish pale, and he was drooling.

“Sick from what he eats . . .” croaked Fitzjames. His blood was sticking to the ice, threatening to freeze him where he stood. He felt the earth groan beneath him. They had been seen. They had been hunted.

Hodgeson’s face was bone-white, ghoulish. He clung to the metal hull of the shuttle to keep himself from doubling over in agony, and his bare flesh tore on the cold metal. _“Tar ra du ma yokul, heh nash-veh dungi tar ra du nam-tor . . .”_ he whispered dully, like a man possessed.

Hickey’s eyes were distant, gazing into some far-off world unseen by other men. “And in Standard, Mr. Hodgeson?”

 _“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,”_ said Hodgeson. He crumpled in on himself like a paper man and vomited into the snow.

“Why are we here,” Magnus choked wetly. He collapsed onto the ice. “Why are we . . . why . . .”

A howling arctic wind blew through them them, whipping open their coats and throwing several men upon their backs. Hickey remained upright, holding fast against the wind with his arms spread, face upturned to the heavens. He looked like a man seeing God. Before them, at a long way off, Fitzjames saw a white shape charging along the ice at speed, half-obscured by a thick bank of fog. It looked at once material and immaterial, some unholy union of lightning and ice, and Fitzjames saw through blurred and swimming vision the precise moment when it leapt forward and struck one of the great towers of false dilithium as a bolt of lightning. The crystal shattered into a blossoming cloud of shimmering dust, and again the creature took physical form, charging across the ice on all fours.

“It’s not dead . . .” Pilkington sobbed. “It’s not dead . . .”

Tozer had the look of an animal driven mad by fright. He tugged at his chain like a dog as though he intended to leap upon the creature himself. “We cannot kill it! We cannot!”

“Kill it?” Hickey laughed. “I thought you fine, upstanding Federation men did not dirty yourselves with killing.”

The creature was close now, descending the hill towards them. Fitzjames saw teeth that gleamed like dirty ice and a neck that grew long, long, as though it meant to become a snake and swallow them whole. “Francis,” Fitzjames hissed, taking one lurching step towards him. Crozier put his arm out in front of him as he backed them both away, but there was nothing to be done. It was fast, and as fluid as water, and all the men who’d been armed had dropped their weapons in the snow. All except Tozer, who stood trembling with his phaser rifle clenched tightly in both hands.

“A man called Cornelius Hickey is dead,” said Hickey. His fingers caressed the knife tucked into his sash. “Bled from every pore. Throat cut. Chucked out the airlock, like as not. Probably didn’t last a minute if he were anything like you sorry soldiers. And here I am, pretty as you please. Here I am and ain’t anybody climbing the ladder, building the empire, making a name for themselves. Here I am. Here I am.”

The creature was almost upon them now, and the men were dead or dying. Sick from what they ate, indeed. Fitzjames could almost laugh.

“Here I am, and I’m stuck here,” Hickey said, his voice raising. “Stuck here with you and that alien thing. Could’ve gone home to some picture-postcard Terra, a fucking utopia where I might bugger off and do what I like. Start new. But no. Only the cold, dark, empty sky, eh? Only this bloody planet. No one told you it’d be this cold, did they, boys?” He was shouting now, looking down at the men bent double beneath him, coughing blood into their own cupped hands. "No one at Starfleet warn you about that? Well, bugger Starfleet! Bugger the Federation! Bugger the Prime Directive!”

The creature stretched out its claws- impossibly long, extended far beyond the reach of any natural beast- and caught Magnus in the belly. He split like a rotten apple and fell to his knees, gurgling. The creature dragged him forward into the fog, leaving a smear of red behind him.

“Open yourself to courage, lads!” Hickey stamped hard on the shuttle roof, scuffing the metal with the heels of Fitzjames’ boots. “Are you Terrors or aren’t you?”

“Forward, all!” Crozier cried. “Stagger yourselves! Strike at its head!”

Tozer hesitated, looking from the charging beast to Crozier at his side; at last he caught up the chain binding Crozier in one hand and burned through it, the phaser melting one of the links into a white-hot drip that burned scattered holes in the ice beneath.

The creature howled. Fitzjames screamed, a mindless shout meant to frighten it. He wanted to leap at the thing, wanted to fight it back, keep it from taking Crozier too, but every move was like ice working its way under his skin, and he couldn’t breathe for the pain.

“My Empire is not the only empire!” cried Hickey, mad with delight. “I’ve seen that now!”

The creature became smoke and the smoke burned through them like a toxic fume. Fitzjames saw Tozer drop, clutching his heart like it had exploded in his chest. The smoke spiraled up and out, taking form, becoming a body of meat and teeth that rendered Des Voeux into quarters and swallowed him like a serpent, and all the while Hickey stood on his shuttle and laughed. Laughed and laughed.

“Devour me, oh alien thing!” he cried, as the Tuunbaq rose up before him, bigger now than Fitzjames had yet seen it. “Devour me! I am from deeper space than you have yet seen!”

“James!” Crozier shouted. “Close your eyes!”

 _Eyes,_ Fitzjames thought wildly, deliriously. _Eyes._

He saw the edges of the Tuunbaq begin to fray, spilling out of itself, becoming a haze of light, and at that moment he knew how it would devour Hickey, and he threw his arm up over his face.

The creature shattered the sky with light.

Light like a nova, light like an engine core reactor, so bright that the darkness behind his eyelids turned red as a bloody sunrise.

He heard a terrible scream. A scream that struck him like a blow to the head. For one wild, insane moment, he wondered if his ears had begun to bleed.

Fitzjames opened his eye a fraction. Peering, squinting, he saw the world as a shimmering mess of color and light, as though heaven and hell were rending the world apart. He saw Hickey there, bent double, his hands over his eyes, screaming like a man possessed. He claws his hands down his face and Fitzjames saw the blood tears streaking his cheeks. And the light. And the _light._

It ran him through like lightning down a rod. Fitzjames saw metal drip down Hickey’s leg like mercury- the knife, liquified by energy. The burning smell of meat. Hickey’s blind eyes and gaping mouth. And heat, _heat_ like Fitzjames hadn’t known for days. Warming his face and his skin like the warmth of his berth on Erebus. The berth where he might close his eyes and sleep, sinking down, down into the warm embrace of darkness, where he might hide his face, and no one would have to look at him anymore.

☆

Crozier dragged himself across the ice, heaving himself slowly on his belly, his eyes shut tight against the brightness of the Tuunbaq's blaze. His hands were bleeding. It didn't matter. Some wild, half-mad part of himself was sure that he could hear Fitzjames' beating heart. They lay not inches apart and if he could but catch hold of him, could just grasp his hand . . .

His fingertips found Fitzjames' shoulder, and felt the sharp edges of crystals there. Crozier clutched at him and dragged himself forward until he lay half across Fitzjames' body. He opened his eyes to mere slits and saw Fitzjames' pale face, his petrified eye. He checked his mouth for breath, and felt the merest moisture touch his palm. Fitzjames lived.

The light began to fade, and with it the burning heat. Crozier closed his eyes, pressed his ridged forehead to the smooth skin of Fitzjames’. _If I were Vulcan,_ he thought desperately, _I might wake you with but a thought._

Breath on his neck. Warm, heavy, and slow. The breath of a god.

Crozier opened his eyes.

He lifted his head and saw the Tuunbaq standing over him, material and immaterial. He saw the softness of its white fur, and beyond it, the icy wilderness. Wisps of smoke curled off it like mist. It looked sick. Sick, perhaps, from Goodsir's poisons.

Crozier wondered if it was still choosing the form it would take to devour them. A light? A bitter wind? Mr. Teeth-and-Claws?

Crozier held Fitzjames in his arms- he clutched him closer now. Clung to him as though he were hope of rescue, as if he were hope itself.

The creature opened its mouth. It seemed to cost it a great effort. Crozier saw teeth, flat and humanoid, drooling with new blood. Hickey’s blood. Fear made Crozier's heart shudder in his breast, and beneath it he felt a crazed, desperate desire to live. _Live,_ if only to see his dying brother to his grave.

The Tuunbaq screamed, and Crozier screamed back.

It was a panicked, senseless, murderous scream that ripped blood from his throat. There was no language but the universal language of a wounded animal.

The Tuunbaq knew that sound well.

It looked at him with eyes like two cold jewels. Crozier stared, emptied of breath, and watched as the Tuunbaq turned away. It walked like a starving animal, a miserable, trudging plod. Crozier watched as it faded into so much mist and stardust.

It had chosen how it would take to devour them.

It would simply leave them to die.

Crozier, dazed, looked down at the man in his arms. His eye was open. Crozier bent his head to Fitzjames’ lips but did not touch them. Their warm breath mingled in the air.

“We will walk back,” Fitzjames whispered. “Boots, then coats. And we will walk back.”

“We can’t walk back across the stars,” said Crozier.

“We will walk,” said Fitzjames, and Crozier helped him up.

☆

They dragged their aching bodies back to camp, two carcasses animated by the merest flicker of spirit. Crozier could taste his own blood on the back of his tongue.

The journey was shorter without the shuttle to drag behind them, but they walked slowly. They hung off each other like meat off a bone. Trying to keep themselves upright. There were times when it seemed inevitable that Crozier should have to carry him, but Fitzjames would not be carried, and both knew that even Crozier’s strength was far too taxed to carry them both very far.

They walked on. They had been gone only a few days. Surely the camp remained.

“Francis,” said Fitzjames. His voice was like wind whistling across the shale.

Crozier’s arm was supporting him. “Brother,” he said, squeezing Fitzjames weakly. _“E’lev. T’hy’la.”_

“If,” said Fitzjames, then trailed off. The camp was just visible now, the floodlights still shining. Unmoving silhouettes stood stiff as boards in the artificial light.

Fitzjames swallowed. The next word was barely audible. Crozier had to lean in to hear him.

“If I asked you,” he said, “would you help me out of it?”

Crozier closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he felt very small, and cold. He was a long way from home.

“I would,” he said. “Without hesitation.”

He felt Fitzjames’ soft exhale of breath. His remaining eye was wet, and he looked at Crozier with the kind of gratitude that breaks a man’s heart. “Romulan,” he croaked, but it was fond. Almost teasing.

The camp was silent when they got there, and it reeked. Men stood in silent repose like the twisted spires in the impact zone. Some looked like they were praying, others like they had simply been going about their business until the crystal growths overtook them. They were like statues now. Medusa’s garden. Crozier saw the features of their bodies reflected in the crystal, down to the minutest detail, but no flesh beneath. Only bones, frozen within their opaque prisons. The soft tissue had been utterly consumed.

Something solid and cold struck his knees; he had dropped to them. Some distance away, lying upon the ground, he saw J’opson’s crystallized form reaching out as though for help. He might have been carved from a single block of dilithium, a sculpture caught in a moment of anguish. His bones were thin and birdlike under the glare of the floodlights.

A low, inhuman sound croaked out from Crozier’s throat. He would have stayed there, staring, unable to move or speak, if Fitzjames had not collapsed beside him.

The sound jolted Crozier’s mind to full awareness. He scrambled across the ice to Fitzjames and fell at his side, feeling for the pulse of a man so close to death. His hands were numb with cold. He had lost all feeling in them.

“Not now,” There was a wild look in his eyes. “Not now.”

Crozier wrestled himself out of his coat and wrapped it around Fitzjames, rubbing his hands and wrists fiercely to massage the life back into him. He breathed, but only just, and there again was that whistling sound. The rot had reached his throat.

 _“Dinam,”_ Crozier whispered. He buried his face in the fur collar of James’ coat. _“Dinam, dinam. Jol-ao au. Jol-ao au, dinam._ James.”

Darkness above them, pierced with stars. Moons like pale faces, silent, and the empty ships drifting like discarded toys. Crozier did not want to look at them. He compelled himself to anyway, and saw that the starlight above him had distorted. Another of the strange complexities of this planet's atmosphere that caused the sky to shimmer like a heat haze. It was a beautiful, vivid disturbance in the universe, like a wrinkle in the world. Crozier had seen such wrinkles a thousand times, always just before a starship leapt out of warp.

His eyes were failing him, surely. Crozier’s hands clenched tighter in Fitzjames’ coat. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t so much as breathe. He felt the hot sting of tears begin to prick at his eyes.

The stars were shining too brightly. The fabric of the night sky seemed to stretch taut. A ship snapped out of hyperspace with a sound like the universe cracking in half. Then another. Another. Another.

“James,” Crozier said hoarsely. Then again, louder. _“James.”_

The whole sky had distorted now, fluxing with the energy of multiple ships dropping out of warp at once. Crozier clutched Fitzjames closer and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “James,” he pleaded. Tears streamed down his face, and he was smiling. “James, it’s Ross. Ross is here. We are _saved._ ”

Fitzjames’ breathing hitched, and he groaned. Crozier saw a sliver of color as he opened his eye.

“Don’t speak,” said Crozier hurriedly. He brushed the loose hair back from Fitzjames’ brow. “Don’t speak. There will be time enough for that.”

He looked up at the sky and saw it filling with ships. Ten ships, twenty, even more. A whole fleet bursting into existence like fireworks. Ross had found their transmission. He had found _them._

Crozier’s hands were shaking. He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out his communicator. It was battered and broken, almost beyond repair, but it hissed and crackled when the mothership locked onto it.

He snapped it open.

“Two to beam up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Tumblr user @oochilka for the wonderful illustration!


End file.
